Marks & Spencer
Senior Software Engineer - Food (Distributed Systems)
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Join the M&S Software Engineering Team
As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you'll be joining a well-overseen historic brand, delivering solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues! With ethical values embedded in our core and engineering leaders who deeply understand the needs of software engineers, we're redefining ourselves as a digital‑first, engineering‑led organisation, where the quality of our engineering team is a key differentiator.
About the Role
The M&S Foods Product team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our fast-paced team. In this exciting role, you’ll provide invaluable technical expertise, deliver thoughtful solutions, and operate with excellence. As a creative, inquisitive, and fearless engineer, you’ll be integral to our empowered, self-managing domain engineering team, pushing the boundaries of how we ingest, model, and distribute food-related data across M&S.
The team manages the core platform supporting supplier systems, pricing and promotion information, product lifecycle management, master data, and critical supply-chain data flows. You’ll play a unique role in delivering high-quality, time-sensitive data to both internal teams and external partners while enabling the growth of a robust food data platform.
This position is a fantastic opportunity to help shape our ambition to build a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture. Join us to help construct a modern digital ecosystem, utilise cutting-edge technologies, and achieve extraordinary work in your career.
What You’ll Do
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Build and enhance reliable data services:
- Design and develop scalable, high-performance pipelines and APIs using Java and Micronaut.
- Integrate with event-streaming platforms such as Kafka to ensure that accurate, timely information flows to downstream systems and business users.
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Own features end-to-end:
- Take full responsibility for the entire feature lifecycle: designing, developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring in production.
- Balance delivery speed and sustainability to keep the platform maintainable and resilient over the long term.
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Shape the technical direction of our Food Platform:
- Contribute to platform architecture by promoting clean data contracts, well-defined schemas, and event models.
- Create solutions that maintain data quality, integration reliability, and developer usability, while considering cost-performance trade-offs at scale.
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Champion engineering excellence:
- Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code.
- Introduce and promote best practices across multiple teams through code reviews, pair programming, and comprehensive documentation.
- Encourage a culture of continuous improvement.
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Drive operational excellence and observability:
- Share responsibility for the reliability of data integrations.
- Use observability tools like Dynatrace to design for monitoring and alerting.
- Participate in the on-call/contingency rota to ensure that supply-chain and pricing data remains accurate and available.
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Collaborate across teams:
- Work closely with Product Managers, cross-functional engineering teams, Supply-Chain, and Commercial teams to address complex business challenges innovatively.
- Foster cross-functional decision-making to shorten time to value and break down organizational information silos.
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Mentor and support your colleagues:
- Provide coaching and feedback to more junior engineers.
- Grow our community of practice by sharing knowledge and fostering an inclusive environment.
Who You Are
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Experienced in data-intensive distributed systems with 5+ years building and scaling services that handle large datasets, typically serving millions of records or transactions.
- Have an understanding of both batch and event-driven processing.
- Ensure systems remain highly resilient at scale.
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Proficient in JVM-based languages, especially Java, ideally with experience using Micronaut, and capable of writing clean, readable, and maintainable code.
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DevOps and CI/CD practitioner with expertise in:
- Designing and managing CI/CD pipelines (such as GitHub Actions).
- Driving improvements in developer productivity and release automation.
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to automate infrastructure changes.
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Cloud and data platform expert who:
- Is comfortable working in cloud environments, preferably Microsoft Azure.
- Has experience with modern data processing and integration tools.
- Values experience with Kafka for event streaming, SFTP for batch data ingestion, relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB), and integrations for product lifecycle and pricing.
- Knowledge in containerization and orchestration technologies (such as Docker and Kubernetes) and Terraform for infrastructure automation is a bonus.
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Data modelling and integration expert who:
- Understands domain-driven design, data contracts, and schema evolution.
- Has a strong sense of data quality and integrity.
- Can integrate with third-party systems without excessive customization.
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Balances strategic thinking with pragmatic delivery:
- Weighs long-term architectural goals against immediate business needs.
- Remains commercially sensitive and thrives in high-autonomy teams.
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Security and quality focused with experience using modern tools like:
- Snyk and Semgrep to detect and manage vulnerabilities.
- Committed to secure coding practices and compliance adherence.
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Open to leveraging AI-assisted development tools, like GitHub Copilot and Claude 3, to enhance productivity and knowledge acquisition while ensuring code quality remains paramount.
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Full-stack awareness, even while primarily working in backend/data engineering:
- Shows understanding of front-end technologies such as React and Angular to improve collaboration across the tech stack.
What’s in it for You
Becoming part of M&S means more than just joining — it means contributing to a forward-thinking, inclusive, and dynamic business with a deep-rooted set of core values. Thanks to our world-class culture and continual evolution, we offer an array of unique benefits to make working for M&S even more special:
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20% Discount on most items from our furniture, fashion, and food ranges.
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First-class welcome to M&S, featuring a customised induction program and a comprehensive selection of training schemes designed to support your growth and development.
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Attractive annual bonus, based on a combination of company performance and personal objectives.
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Competitive holiday entitlement with the opportunity to purchase extra holiday days.
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M&S Choices: Access to an industry-leading range of perks and discounts, including:
- GymSave memberships
- Option to become an M&S Shareholder
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Paid Volunteering Day: A dedicated day off work to support your favoured charity.
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Generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
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Access to an ever-expanding wellbeing support package, including:
- A 24/7 Virtual GP service
- Additional wellbeing initiatives to support your health and happiness.
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