As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you’ll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serves 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’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who gets genuinely excited about building things that engineers love to use. On Web Platform, your users aren’t customers - they’re the web engineers at M&S. Your job is to make them faster, happier, and more capable: sharper tooling, better pipelines, cleaner abstractions, and less toil. If shipping a platform improvement that saves every web engineer an hour a week sounds more satisfying than shipping a customer feature, this role is for you.
The Web Platform is a set of opinionated, productised tools (Next.js, TypeScript, NX, Playwright, Jest, GitHub Actions) used by every team building web apps at M&S. We focus on developer productivity, satisfaction, and lead time to change - making sure every web engineer at M&S is as effective and happy as they can be.
What You’ll Do
Your key accountabilities will include:
- Software Development: Design, build, and evolve the platform capabilities that web engineers across M&S depend on every day - shared libraries, tooling, pipelines, and standards. Write production-quality code and lead on the hardest technical problems the team faces.
- Technical Leadership: Set technical direction for the Web Platform. Define standards, drive adoption across engineering teams, and shape how web engineering is done at M&S. Your influence extends well beyond the immediate team.
Architecture and Design: Own architectural decisions for the platform - from monorepo structure and build system design to CI/CD strategy and rendering model choices. Ensure the platform evolves with the needs of the organisation and stays ahead of the web engineering curve.
- Code Review: Review and provide constructive feedback on code submissions from team members, ensuring alignment to technical standards, maintainability, and high-quality software.
- Collaboration: Work closely with engineering teams across M&S to understand their pain points and drive platform adoption. Represent Web Platform in cross-functional technical forums, design reviews, and 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: Keep the platform at the cutting edge. Track developments in the web ecosystem - Next.js, Vercel, edge computing, React Server Components - and translate them into platform strategy and roadmap decisions.
- Documentation: Write advanced system and operations documentation and perform advanced internal tech talks to share knowledge and best practices.
- Developer Experience: Champion DX as a first-class product concern. Measure and improve engineering productivity using frameworks like DORA and SPACE. Eliminate toil, shorten feedback loops, and make the on-ramp for new engineers as smooth as possible.
Who You Are
Your skills and experience will include:
- A platform or IDP mindset - you’ve built tools, libraries, or capabilities for engineers, not just features for customers. The idea of making a web engineer’s day meaningfully better is what motivates you.
- Deep production experience with modern web engineering: React, Next.js, and TypeScript at scale
- 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
- Strong monorepo and build tooling experience (NX or equivalent) - you care about build performance, library boundaries, and merge reliability
- Familiarity with developer productivity measurement frameworks such as DORA and SPACE
Tech Stack
You’ll need strong hands-on experience with our core stack:
React (Next.js / TypeScript) - in production, at scale
NX monorepo tooling
GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipeline design
Playwright and Jest
Azure Cloud
Observability tooling (Dynatrace or equivalent)
Whats in it for You
Working at M&S means being part of something bigger — helping deliver quality, value, and service to millions every day. We’re inclusive, fastmoving, and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing.
- 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third party brands
- Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more
- Discretionary performance based bonus schemes
- Strong pension and life assurance
- Tailored induction and continuous development support
- Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal
- Market leading, family friendly policies (parental, adoption, neonatal leave)
- 24/7 wellbeing support including virtual GP and mental health services
- One paid volunteer day per year
Everyone’s Welcome
We are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re disrupting, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming 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.
