Marks and Spencer UK Jobs – Software Engineer

About the job

Job purpose

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you will be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serves millions of committed 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 sophisticated and robust solutions to solve sophisticated problems for our customers and colleagues.

You will play a key role in driving our ambition to build an outstanding 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 care

Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities

The Staff Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

• Help define and implement the long-term strategic vision for the decisioning platform.
• Define architectural and infrastructure requirements with a platform thinking attitude.
• Manage technical relationships and support agreements with third party vendors.
• Lead the team to provide standard methodology for implementing integrations with vendor products, internal experience teams and other products via event consumers and publishers, REST and GraphQL API’s and data lake pipelines.
• Put inference models into production as REST API’s and tune for reliability and scale while seeking to automate and improve ML maturity.
• Solve problems collaboratively, presenting decisions to partners.
• Active participation and contribution to Communities of Practice with a focus on positive momentum
• Coach, mentor and develop by providing the knowledge and assets to less experienced engineers
• Help lead initiatives to take M&S Software Engineering to the next level by challenging the status quo

Area information

The decisioning platform is a suite of orchestration layers that consume machine learning models and business rules and thoughtfully augments customer journeys and experiences based on these inputs. The outcome of this is to provide high fidelity and fine-grained personalised experiences for our customers.

The area needs to automate and scale this capability, and demonstrates multiple providers of the inputs, including our own in-house data models. We use a combination of 3rd party solutions and in-house tools for orchestration.

Tech stack

Essential:

• REST services
• Python and PySpark
• Event Driven Architecture (Pub/Sub and stream processing)
• ML Model Deployment

Desirable:

• GraphQL
• Java Spring Boot
• Databricks
• Azure Data Lake and Azure Data Factory
• Kafka, Kafka Streams and Confluent ksqlDB
• Kubernetes and Azure App Services
• Sales Force Marketing Cloud, mParticle, Sitecore CDP/Boxever, Adobe Target

Key Experience– the ideal candidate will have

Essential

• Strong experience in most of the tech stack areas
• 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
• Proficiency of documenting software design technical decisions and recommendations
• Experience with experimentation suites for A/B and multivariate testing

Desirable

• An agile and lean product attitude
• Knowledge of Software approaches like Domain Driven Design
• Cares about the business and the bigger picture
• Effective communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences
• A leadership mentality that is willing to take responsibility
• An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker

Works closely with

You’ll be working closely with other Software Engineers, Data Scientists and Product Managers across multiple squads to collaboratively tackle problems. There will be day-to-day interactions with Technical Programme Managers, who you’ll work with to constantly evolve your team’s ways of working. You will also interact with other specialists such as Head of Departments, Architects, UX/UI Designers, and analytics authorities.

As a member of M&S Software Engineering, you’ll also work with and learn from other engineers and specialists in the organisation through Business Platforms, Product Portfolios, Product Groups, other teams and Communities of Practice.

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That’s why we’re revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. There’s never been a better time to be part of our team. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact. We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process, and we are happy to talk flexible working.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process. If you consider yourself to have a disability or learning difficulty which means you are unable to complete the application process online, please get in touch either by phone on 0345 300 3725 or by email [email protected] so we can make alternative arrangements for you.