Marks & Spencer
Senior Software Engineer - Food (Distributed Systems)
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As part of the M&S Software Engineering team
Join a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues! M&S is redefining itself into a digital-first and engineering-led organisation, with technology leaders prioritising software engineers' values.
About the Role
The M&S Foods Product team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join a dynamic, self-managing engineering team. You will provide technical leadership, develop innovative solutions, and push boundaries in food-related data ingestion, modelling, and distribution across M&S.
You will work on the platform supporting supplier systems, pricing/promotion data, product lifecycle, master data, and critical supply-chain integrations. The team provides high-quality, timely data to colleagues and partners and enables teams to build on our food data platform.
As part of this role, you'll help create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture while collaborating with cutting-edge technologies in a modern digital ecosystem.
What You’ll Do
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Build and evolve reliable data services:
- Design and develop scalable, high-performance pipelines and APIs in Java and Micronaut.
- Integrate with event-streaming platforms like Kafka.
- Ensure accurate, timely information reaches downstream systems and users.
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Own end-to-end feature development:
- Manage the full lifecycle from design through development, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.
- Balance speed with sustainability to maintain platform long-term maintainability.
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Shape the technical direction of our Food Platform:
- Contribute to platform architecture, promoting clean data contracts, well-defined schemas, and event models.
- Optimise for 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, test-driven code.
- Establish best practises via code reviews, pair programming, and high-quality documentation.
- Foster a continuous improvement culture.
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Drive operational excellence and observability:
- Share responsibility for the reliability of data integrations.
- Use tools (e.g., Dynatrace) for monitoring/alerting.
- Participate in on-call rotations to maintain supply-chain and pricing data accuracy/availability.
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Collaborate extensively:
- Work closely with Product Managers, cross-functional engineering teams, Supply Chain, and Commercial.
- Solve business problems innovatively while breaking down silos for faster time-to-value.
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Mentor and support colleagues:
- Provide coaching and feedback to junior engineers.
- Share knowledge and foster an inclusive, knowledge-sharing culture.
Who You Are
- 5+ years of experience designing and scaling data-intensive distributed systems (e.g., handling millions of records/transactions).
- Proficient in JVM languages (e.g., Java) with experience in Micronaut and best practises for clean, maintainable code.
- DevOps and CI/CD expert:
- Skilled in designing/deploying CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions).
- Experienced with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) for automation.
- Cloud and data platform familiarity:
- Practical Azure experience and familiarity with modern tools like Kafka (event streaming) and SFTP (batch data ingestion).
- Knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases (MongoDB), product lifecycle/pricing SaaS integrations, Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform is a plus. -Strong domain-driven design, data modelling, and integration expertise:
- Focus on data quality/integrity and efficient third-party integrations without excessive customisation.
- Balances strategic thinking with pragmatic delivery:
- Aligns long-term architecture with immediate business needs.
- Sensitive to commercial impact in high-autonomy teams.
- Committed to security and quality:
- Experience with static analysis tools (Snyk, Semgrep) and secure coding compliance.
- Open to leveraging AI tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude) while maintaining code quality.
- All-round software engineering awareness:
- While backend/data-focused, understanding of front-end frameworks (React/Angular) aids collaboration.
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What’s in it for You
Being part of M&S means contributing to an inclusive, innovative, and forward-thinking organisation rooted in core values.
Benefits:
- 20% colleague discount on furniture, fashion, and food.
- Tailored induction and extensive training schemes for learning and development.
- Competitive annual bonus, based on company performance and objectives.
- Competitive holiday entitlement (with potential extras).
- Access to exclusive M&S Choices discounts (e.g., GymSave) or shareholder options.
- Paid Charity Volunteer Day.
- Generous pension scheme (Defined Contribution) and life assurance.
- Comprehensive wellbeing support (including a 24/7 Virtual GP).
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