Software Engineering Manager - AI Engineering

We're changing the way we do things, and putting industry leading innovation at the heart of how we operate; we need a stellar engineering team to make it happen. You'll be joining one of the most iconic brands in the UK on its most exciting cycle yet. We're more integrated and product led in our tech teams than ever before: learning, changing, and adapting constantly, with millions of people benefiting from your work every single day.

You'll be joining the M&S Platform team as a Software Engineering Manager. Our mission is to streamline development at M&S for 200+ engineers and 30+ applications - covering both our customer-facing and colleague-facing applications.

You will manage the team building the AI Engineering platform. You will support the team and help direct the technical vision for how we will build reusable pipelines, tooling, build plugins and frameworks that our many apps will harness to boost the developer experience, while contributing code every step of the way.

We want to make M&S one of the best places for software development, target the latest tooling and enable our engineers to focus on building the best user experience so that they don't get held up by common engineering and continuous integration problems.

What You'll Do

• Being accountable for engineering excellence within your teams, from behaviours to operations, from technical direction to solution in production and from skills and growth to reputation.
• Cultivating self-management and accountability throughout the team via leadership, clear sense of purpose and thoughtful talent management.
• Lead alignment with the overarching technical strategy and working with the wider Technology organisation to craft it.
• Act as a platform owner, apply accurate product thinking to what is being built with a view to enable and empower as much as possible the digital product(s) that it supports through data and customer centricity, driving the related partner management.
• Collaborate with the entire engineering leadership, to make us think strategically, to ensure maximum alignment and to maintain a healthy ability to "think big" within their teams.
• Line management of supporting Staff and Senior Engineers, as well as driving recruitment and retention within the team.
• Act as custodian of OKR's within your hub.
• Supports our engineering communities to drive bar raising and strategic alignment, by creating the space and time within teams for the agenda of these communities to be progressed efficiently.
• When vendors are involved, the SEM is positioned as the key technical partner. They own it as a vital part of their platform with the same level of reliability and satisfaction as the in-house capabilities they build and run.

Who You Are

• Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer
• Excellent knowledge in AI coding tools and agentic technologies
• Extensive background in software engineering with several years' experience in a variety of systems and technologies
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers that deliver high-quality software.
• Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies,
• Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
• Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills
• Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers and technical partners to a desired outcome, without prescribing it.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different, including non-technical audiences.
• A servant-leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems.
• Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical

Our Tech Stack

• GitHub Actions, Copilot SDK, and agentic workflows
• Model evaluation and quality measurement
• Secure AI integrations, identity, and access control
• Agent frameworks and orchestration patterns
• Cloud deployment and production operations
• TypeScript or Kotlin for production software development

What's In It For You

Working at M&S means being part of something bigger - helping to deliver quality, value and service to millions of customers every day. We're inclusive, fast-moving and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing.

Here are just a few of the benefits that make working here even more rewarding:

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third-party brands for you and someone in your household, available once you've completed your probation
• Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more
• Discretionary bonus schemes linked to your performance and ours
• Strong pension and life assurance to help plan for the future
• Tailored induction and training to support your development from day one
• Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal
• Market-leading family policies, including parental, adoption and neonatal leave
• 24/7 wellbeing support, including virtual GP access and mental health services
• One paid volunteer day a year to support a cause that matters to you

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.

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