Software Engineering Manager – Integration CORE
This is a leadership role at the heart of M&S's integration transformation. You'll be building and leading an engineering team responsible for the messaging backbone and integration platforms that connect every major system at M&S from warehouse management and food distribution to SAP financials and partner connectivity. This is a transformative role. We're at the beginning of a multi-year journey to modernise our integration estate and build a cloud-native platform for the future. You won't just be keeping the lights on, you'll be leading the engineering team that builds what comes next, while maintaining the mission‑critical flows that process millions of messages daily.
Technical Landscape
Our current integration estate spans IBM technologies (MQ, App Connect Enterprise, DataStage, DB2), MuleSoft, Apigee, MongoDB Atlas, and Azure cloud services. Observability is provided through Dynatrace.
Impact We're Looking For
- Define the future state: Shape the target integration platform architecture and the roadmap to get there, working alongside Principal Engineers and Architects
- Build platform capabilities: Create self‑service patterns and golden paths so product teams can integrate without central team bottlenecks
- Maintain operational excellence: Keep the messaging backbone reliable and predictable, where incidents are rare and quickly resolved
- Improve reliability: Drive measurable reductions in incident rates, mean time to resolution, and on‑call burden
- Develop your team: Build a high‑performing engineering team, driving recruitment, retention, and professional growth
Key Accountabilities
- Lead multiple integration engineering teams, owning the technical vision and delivery roadmap
- Be accountable for reliability targets and operational health across messaging and integration platforms
- Drive operational excellence: on‑call health, incident response, change management, and peak readiness
- Cultivate single‑threaded ownership, your team builds it, they run it
- Partner with other engineering managers across the integration domain to ensure coherent patterns and shared standards
- Act as the key technical partner for any vendor delivery, owning outcomes not just outputs
- Line manage Staff and Senior Engineers, driving recruitment, retention, and professional growth
- Balance capacity across operational stability, platform modernisation, and technical debt reduction
Qualifications
- Previous hands‑on experience with enterprise messaging technologies (IBM MQ, Azure Service Bus, or similar)
- Depth in integration middleware: ACE, MuleSoft, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, or equivalent
- Track record of leading engineering teams through platform modernisation or legacy‑to‑cloud migrations
- Strong understanding of reliability engineering: SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management
- Ability to balance operational stability with transformation: you know when to protect production and when to push for change
- Excellent people management and communication skills: you can adjust for technical and non‑technical audiences
- A servant‑leadership mentality: you unblock your team, set direction, and take ownership of outcomes
- Comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical levels. You can discuss architecture with architects and debug a production incident with your engineers
Desirable Experience
- Experience with IBM technologies (MQ, ACE, DataStage, DB2) and cloud‑native alternatives
- Azure integration services (Service Bus, Functions, Logic Apps, Event Hub)
- Background in retail, logistics, or other high‑volume transaction environments
- Experience with DR/HA patterns, peak planning, and peak‑period operations
- Experience building and leading blended teams across permanent, contract, and vendor resources
Tech Stack
- Our current integration estate spans IBM technologies (MQ, App Connect Enterprise, DataStage, DB2), MuleSoft, Apigee, MongoDB Atlas, and Azure cloud services. Observability is provided through Dynatrace. CI/CD is delivered through GitHub Actions and Terraform.
Benefits
- 20% Colleague discount on most things from furniture, fashion and food.
- A first‑class welcome to M&S with a tailored induction and a wide range of training schemes to help with your learning and development. Having options to progress is something we're proud of at M&S.
- Attractive annual bonus, based on company performance and personal objectives.
- Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
- Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices website. Including GymSave - that offers up to 25% off Gym Memberships and the option to become an M&S Shareholder using our ShareSave & ShareBuy Schemes
- Charity Volunteer Day - A paid day away from work to support your chosen charity.
- A very generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance
- Every colleague at M&S has access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support - this includes access to our 24/7 Virtual GP, PAM Assist to support you & your family as well as many other schemes
- Family friendly policies to support life's most important landmarks including parental leave, neo‑natal
Inclusion & Equal Opportunities
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.
Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact.
If you consider yourself to require reasonable adjustments to any part of our recruitment process, we invite you to share those requirements with us when completing your application. We will make every effort to ensure your needs are met to provide a fair and transparent process of assessment.
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