Staff Software Engineer - Web Platform

Marks and Spencer; London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job description

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Staff Software Engineer - Web Platform

What's in it for you

Being a part of M&S is exactly that - playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We're an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing outstanding quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.

Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special:

• After completing your probationary period, you'll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third-party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry-leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

What you'll do

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you'll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues! With ethical values that run right through the company's core and technology leaders that truly understand software engineers and engineering, it's an exciting time as we're redefining ourselves into a digital first and engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator.

We are seeking a passionate Staff Software Engineer who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence. Being creative, curious, and fearless, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self-managing, multi-disciplinary engineering teams - designing, building, releasing, and maintaining products. Working as an equal partner with the Product and Delivery teams you will deliver elegant and robust solutions to solve complex problems for our customers and colleagues.

The Web Platform is a set of opinionated tools (Next.js, TypeScript, NX, Playwright, Jest, GitHub Actions) used by anyone building web apps at M&S. We focus on productivity metrics, developer satisfaction, and lead time to change, to make sure every engineer at M&S is as effective as they can be. The Staff Software Engineer role is the embodiment of solving problems through technology with key responsibilities as follows:

• Software Development: Write, test, and debug code for complex features, distributed systems, or legacy migrations. Lead on designing and optimising deployment pipelines.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and support on complex, high-impact projects that align with team objectives, ensuring successful delivery of software solutions, while tackling the hardest technical challenges for the team.
• Architecture and Design: Lead the development of architectural and design solutions for large-scale projects, ensuring that software solutions align with business requirements, long-term technology strategy, and technology standards.
• Code Review: Review and provide constructive feedback on code submissions from team members, ensuring alignment to technical standards, maintainability, and high-quality software.
• Collaboration: Communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of collaborators, including senior management and external partners, while leading or starting communities of practice.
• Mentorship: Actively mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering an environment of continuous learning and growth, while participating in hiring processes and training engineers up to Staff standard.
• Operational Stability: Demonstrate a production-first attitude, continuously considering observability and maintaining Service Level Objectives, while delivering change at pace.
• Research & Innovation: Embrace emerging technologies and trends, and share insights with the organisation, while developing and maintaining the team technology roadmap and leading on the strategic approach to monitoring and maintaining production systems.
• Documentation: Write advanced system and operations documentation and perform advanced internal tech talks to share knowledge and best practices.
• Recruitment & Onboarding: Assist with the recruitment and onboarding of new engineers into the organisation.

Tech stack

M&S Front-end teams use a variety of technologies including:

• React (Next.js / Typescript)
• GraphQL Federation
• Azure Cloud
• Observability Tools such as New Relic and Dynatrace

Who you are

You will play a key role in driving our ambition to create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to drive this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem using exciting technologies and do the best work of their careers.

• You'll have strong experience in most of the tech stack areas, from front-end through to back-end.
• Expert understanding of software development practices.
• Solid expertise with distributed version controls systems like Git.
• Proficiency with Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and non-functional testing.
• Strong experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
• Advocate of Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery.
• Experience with cloud engineering and highly scalable applications.
• Proficiency of documenting software design technical decisions and recommendations.
• Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues.

Desirable experience

• Knowledge of modern front-end techniques - edge computing, micro-frontends, server components.
• Experience with developer productivity frameworks such as DORA and SPACE.

Everyone's welcome

We are ambitious about the future of retail. We're redefining, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We're redefining how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen.

We are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. We support each other and work together to win together.

If you feel you'd benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don't hesitate to let us know when completing your application. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.