Software Engineering Manager - Food & International Food

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you’ll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues. With ethical values that run right through the company’s core and technology leaders who truly understand software engineering, it’s an exciting time as we continue our transformation into a digital-first, engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering teams being a key differentiator.

We are modernising the platforms that power how M&S Foods designs products, collaborates with suppliers and manages commercial decisions. These systems sit at the centre of the M&S Foods ecosystem and support thousands of internal users and suppliers across product development, supply chain and commercial operations.

As a Software Engineering Manager – Food & International Food, you will help shape the architecture and technical direction of these platforms. Working across multiple product teams, you’ll solve complex engineering problems, improve system reliability and establish shared technical patterns that enable teams to build safely and efficiently. Our focus is evolving a complex landscape of legacy systems and point-to-point integrations into modern API-led and event-driven distributed systems that are easier to scale, operate and extend.

Due to high interest, this role may close earlier than advertised. We recommend applying as soon as possible.What You'll DoYour key accountabilities will include:

• Lead and develop high-performing engineering teams, creating a culture of collaboration, accountability, innovation and continuous improvement.
• Define and evolve architecture for critical systems across the Foods domain, including service boundaries, integration patterns, APIs, event models and data structures.
• Lead the design of solutions that span multiple teams and distributed systems, solving complex engineering challenges at scale.
• Modernise legacy platforms and integrations, helping transition existing workflows from tightly coupled and batch-based approaches to scalable API-led and event-driven architectures.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, design reviews, mentoring and collaborative problem-solving across multiple engineering teams.
• Champion engineering excellence by raising standards in testing, observability, reliability, resilience and operational practices.
• Enable teams to adopt shared platform capabilities and reusable patterns, reducing duplication and driving consistency across the technology landscape.

Key challenges you'll help solve:

• Simplifying complex legacy integrations across enterprise systems.
• Defining clear domain boundaries and service ownership across platforms.