Principal Engineering Manager - Retail Technology

Job content

Job Description:

The opportunity

A role within M&S Software Engineering means you’ll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on a digital platform that serves millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues.

M&S Software Engineering is a friendly, passionate, and humble team, where everyone has a voice and is encouraged to contribute ideas and talk straight. Our colleagues get the opportunity to learn and grow, take true ownership, influence our technology and transformation, and help us solve exciting problems for our customers and colleagues.

We pride ourselves on being a company that puts engineering first and are looking for people to join our community of engineers to build modern features using exciting technologies, participate in our hackathons and do the best work of their careers.

Area information

M&S Technology is commencing a significant programme of growth initiatives and technology is a key enabler. This year is a particularly exciting time to get on board as we look to make step changes in the technology that supports our stores. As a Principal Engineering Manager, you will be pivotal and visible within the role in driving the success of our business strategy through the delivery of technology.

The initial focus for the role will be our Connected Selling Platform (CSP) in which you will play a critical role in ensuring we are making the correct engineering decisions to ensure we can build, test, learn and deploy at pace to demonstrate value to the business. CSP is part of our omnichannel selling strategy, focused on stores but will be partnered closely with our online teams to deliver end to end journeys for our customer base.

As well as a focus on CSP there will be an opportunity to work across the Retail Technology portfolio delivering solutions that can transform the experience of customers and colleagues in stores.

This is a fantastic opportunity to take a leading role on a high-profile and quality driven team at the forefront of delivering the business strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the senior technical leader for all engineering and development responsibilities within a given portfolio
• Set the technical direction and demonstrate active responsibility for the entire portfolio’s objectives
• Support, develop, implement M&S Engineering talent strategy
• Foster self-management and accountability at the team level through servant leadership
• Collaborate closely with senior management to create strategic objectives and organisational evolutions to better align business, product and technical opportunities
• Ensure the engineering and platform development roadmaps and backlogs reflect the strategy
• Approach and contribute to product planning and roadmap with an agile approach
• Drive delivery of the engineering roadmap.
• Orchestrate a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement across the organisation to ensure scalability and long-term efficiency.
• Pro-actively seek relevant external insight, trends and innovations to ensure M&S remains best in class.
• Communicate regularly in writing & in speech to the entire portfolio & related business units.
• Build strong senior relationships with our partners ensuring seamless engineering capability across companies.
• Face into and resolve issues that may develop between the portfolio and other parts of the business or technology partners.
• Ensure software engineering costs for the portfolio are known, supervised and optimised.
• Form new teams with efficiency and set them up for long-term success.
• Line-manage, coach, mentor and develop Software Development Managers and Software Engineers.
• Demonstrate and champion pragmatism in terms of commercial delivery and software quality.
• Promote technology, values and ways of working within the team and wider software engineering community.
  
  

Working together

You’ll be working closely with Head of Software Engineering, Head of Technology, Head of Product, , & Principal Architects, Commercial and Finance, CTOs, SDMs, Software Engineers and other Principal Engineering Managers.

Within these relationships, you continuously review and improve our engineering practices and manage the technology matrix available to our engineers associated with M&S Software Development.

As a member of M&S Software Engineering, you will have the chance to work alongside and learn from other engineers and specialists in the organisation via our teams (Squads), sets of squads (Tribes), communities of practices (Fellowships), strategic assemblies (Orchestras) or special interest groups (Guilds).

How You Will Measure Success

• Role model with the ‘M&S Way’
• Clear objectives that are often met (but not always)
• Throughput, quality, stability and performance of the portfolio
• Positive feedback from colleagues and partners
• Frequent contributions to the critical thinking of the area
• Efficient advocacy of evangelism within software engineering.
• Upskilling of direct line reports so that significant career growth is seen.
• Proficiency in influencing senior management.
• Effectiveness of partner relationships
  
  

Area tech stack

Current Stack

• Frontend – Angular.js
• Backend – SpringBoot, MS.Net
• Database Technologies including DB2, SQLServer and AzureSQL
• Queues - IBM MQ
• Reporting built with MS SSRS and PowerBI
• CI/CD using Jenkins, Concourse, Sonar, Nexus
• Modern JavaScript frameworks
• Microservice architecture
• Everything Cloud(Azure)
• SRE approach
• AI/Machine Learning capabilities
• Event Streaming platform with Kafka.
  
  

What’s Needed To Succeed

Mission Critical Experiences

• Solid background in software engineering with many years’ experience in a variety of systems and technologies.
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled software engineers that deliver high-quality software.
• Strong understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies.
• Advocate for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
• Specialist in Agile, lean and DevOps.
• Good understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering.
• Highly organised and able to handle multiple work streams, manage partners and expectations.
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills
• Confident driving system design conversations, ensuring software systems built correctly.
• Experience in data management and related programmes and architectures.
• Experience in supporting communities that are sustainable.
• Experience with the public cloud.
  
  

Mission Critical Attributes

• A passion for all aspects of software development.
• Excellent communication skills to adjust for different audiences.
• Acts as a driving force in the engineering community.
• Cares about the reputation of their team, the business and the bigger picture.
• A leadership and ‘leads by example’ demeanor that naturally takes ownership.
• Very delivery focused and takes pride in being reliable, and delivering high-quality product.
• Displays high levels of conscientiousness, tenacity and agility in their work.
• Able to influence people at all levels and from the highly technical to non-technical.