Staff Software Engineer – Commercial Planning

Overview

In this role you will help shape the next generation of commercial planning platforms for a historic retail brand. You’ll lead and mentor engineering efforts, drive scalable, secure solutions, and ensure strong observability across systems. Working with cross-functional partners, you’ll translate business needs into robust technical designs and champion engineering excellence. This is an opportunity to impact growth and modernization within a digital-first, engineering-led organisation.

Pay / Benefits

• 20% colleague discount on products
• Competitive holiday allowance
• Discretionary bonus schemes
• Strong pension and life assurance
• Tailored induction and training
• M&S Choices perks portal

Responsibilities

• Develop, test and debug software, setting high standards for coding practices and engineering quality
• Provide expert technical guidance on complex projects, aligning solutions with strategy and roadmaps
• Lead design and delivery of scalable software and third-party integrations with Architecture teams
• Conduct code reviews to enforce standards, maintainability, and automated testing
• Build partnerships with stakeholders to design technically sound solutions
• Mentor and coach engineers across levels to grow capability
• Drive operational excellence through monitoring, observability, alerting and incident management
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and AI capabilities, proposing innovative improvements

Key requirements

• Proven track record of building high-performing, scalable backend systems with resilience
• Strong grounding in software engineering principles, design patterns and modern practices
• Solid understanding of automated testing across unit, integration and end-to-end levels
• Hands-on experience implementing DevSecOps at scale for enterprise-grade apps
• Proficiency in Java, PL/SQL, JavaScript, Git and CI/CD tooling
• Experience designing scalable cloud-based applications with emphasis on performance and security
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Mentoring mindset to develop engineers and empower teams
• Experience using AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) and agentic workflows to improve delivery

• Strong communication
• Stakeholder management
• Mentoring mindset
• Java
• PL/SQL
• JavaScript

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