Software Engineering Manager- Payments

Benefits

• 20% Colleague discount on most things from furniture, fashion and food.
• A first‑class welcome with a tailored induction and a wide range of training schemes.
• Attractive annual bonus based on company performance and personal objectives.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the option to buy extra holiday days.
• Enhanced perks and discounts via the M&S Choices website, including GymSave discounts and the option to become an M&S shareholder.
• Charity Volunteer Day – a paid day to support a chosen charity.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• Wellbeing support including access to a 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist.
• Family‑friendly policies supporting life milestones such as parental leave and neo‑natal care.

Responsibilities

You will lead the Store Payments & Infrastructure domain, managing engineering teams that deliver business strategy around optimizing payments, customer experience and reducing shrinkage while maintaining reliability in live trading environments.

• Accountable for engineering excellence across behaviours, operations, technical direction, solution delivery, skills, growth and reputation.
• Foster self‑management and accountability, ensuring teams own and operate business‑critical store systems.
• Align with the overarching technical strategy, collaborating with the wider Technology organisation to make it achievable within store estate constraints.
• Act as platform owner, applying product thinking to improve reliability, scalability and developer productivity, while managing partners and vendors.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership to think strategically, maintain alignment and enable safe, incremental modernisation.
• Line‑manage staff and senior engineers; drive recruitment, retention and capability building.
• Lead engineering performance goals related to reliability, speed of change and quality.
• Own third‑party delivery when vendors are involved, ensuring equal expectations for reliability and change speed.
• Drive modernisation and evolve the software delivery lifecycle, continuously identifying and reducing technical debt.

Qualifications

• Previous senior software engineer with experience across complex, production‑critical systems.
• Strong knowledge of modern web, mobile or backend technologies within legacy and hardware‑integrated environments.
• Extensive background in software engineering across a variety of large‑scale, live operational environments.
• Experience building and leading senior engineering teams delivering high‑quality software.
• Excellent understanding of system design, architecture, cloud, and standard engineering methodologies.
• Proactive DevOps mindset: build, run, own production systems.
• Deep knowledge of testing strategies and reliability engineering in live environments.
• Experience modernising legacy systems and managing technical debt.
• Strong Agile practices: sprint planning, stand‑ups, backlog refinement, retrospectives.
• Understanding of end‑to‑end solution lifecycles from discovery to operation.
• Experience working across distributed teams (onshore, nearshore, offshore).
• Effective stakeholder management and communication across commercial and technical audiences.
• Ability to make prioritisation and trade‑off decisions balancing short‑term risk and long‑term sustainability.
• Excellent people‑management, analytical and problem‑solving skills.
• Capable of leading and line‑managing senior engineers and technical partners toward outcomes without prescribing the exact path.
• Strong written and spoken communication skills adaptable to non‑technical audiences.
• Customer‑and‑team‑centric mentality that takes ownership of problems and outcomes.

Tech Stack

• REST APIs with Micronaut, Spring Boot and JUnit.
• Event processing with Kafka.
• CI/CD via GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines.
• Microservice architecture, Azure DevOps, Kubernetes, Docker.
• Azure Storage, Redis, Dynatrace for observability.
• Integration with third‑party applications and store hardware (tills, self‑checkout, peripherals).
• Focus on integration‑driven development, end‑to‑end testing and operating across legacy and modern platforms.

Inclusion & Equality

We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process. We welcome reasonable adjustments during recruitment to ensure a fair and transparent assessment process.

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