Software Engineering Manager - Core Integration

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 Central Tech team as a Software Engineering Manager - Integration CORE. Our mission is to power the connectivity across M&S by building and operating the integration platforms and messaging backbone that underpin every major system, from warehouse management and food distribution through to SAP financials and partner ecosystems.

You will lead engineering teams responsible for the integration CORE domain, shaping the future of our integration estate while ensuring the stability of mission-critical systems that process millions of messages every day. This is a transformative role at the heart of M&S’s integration modernisation journey, where you’ll balance platform innovation with operational excellence.

You will define and deliver the roadmap for a modern, cloud-native integration platform, creating reusable patterns and enabling product teams to integrate efficiently, while maintaining the reliability and performance of our existing estate.

We want to make M&S one of the best places for engineers to build and operate platforms at scale-reducing friction, improving reliability and enabling teams to move faster with confidence.

What You’ll Do

• Being accountable for engineering excellence across integration teams, from technical direction to operational performance and service reliability.
• Leading and developing engineers, cultivating ownership, accountability and a strong engineering culture.
• Defining the future integration platform architecture and roadmap in partnership with Principal Engineers and Architects.
• Building platform capabilities, including self-service integration patterns and reusable components to enable product teams.
• Maintaining operational excellence across the messaging backbone, ensuring stability, resilience and fast incident resolution.
• Driving improvements in reliability, reducing incident rates, mean time to resolution and operational burden.
• Partnering with other engineering leaders to ensure consistency in patterns, standards and ways of working.
• Owning vendor relationships and third-party delivery, focusing on outcomes and platform performance.
• Balancing priorities across operational stability, platform modernisation and technical debt reduction.

• Experienced engineering leader with a background in integration or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise messaging technologies such as IBM MQ, Azure Service Bus or similar.
• Strong knowledge of integration middleware including ACE, MuleSoft, Azure Functions or Logic Apps.
• Proven track record leading teams through platform modernisation or legacy-to-cloud transformation.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering, including SLOs, observability, incident management and operational excellence.
• Ability to balance operational stability with transformation in a complex, high-volume environment.
• Excellent leadership, communication and stakeholder management skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• A servant-leadership mindset, focused on enabling teams and owning outcomes.
• Comfortable operating at both strategic and hands-on levels, from architecture discussions to incident support.

Our Tech Stack

• IBM MQ, App Connect Enterprise, DataStage, DB2
• MuleSoft and Apigee
• Azure cloud services (Service Bus, Functions, Logic Apps, Event Hub)
• MongoDB Atlas
• Dynatrace (observability)
• GitHub Actions and Terraform (CI/CD)

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.