Principal Software Engineer

Description:

We are seeking a passionate Principal Software Engineer to join our Food & International Food category, where you will be a driving force behind the modernisation of mission-critical systems for M&S, as we scale. As a technical leader, you will be collaborating with multiple cross-functional teams to design, build, and maintain the software that powers us everyday. Your expertise will help us create a best-in-class engineering environment while ensuring our systems are robust, scalable, and reusable across our multiple warehouses.

Reports to

Senior Head of Software Engineering

Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities

The Principal Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

Lead technical excellence from design to operations and launch of core product features or strategic programmes 
Drive technical direction and influence our overall strategy informing decisions on both Technology and Product investments as well as teams’ setup 
Champion Communities of Practice to help establish engineering excellence at M&S 
Lead by example via contributions to our engineering ecosystem 
Pioneer and promote methodologies like clean code and clean architecture 
Advocate for engineering productivity, delivery quality and operational excellence through a continuous ecosystem 
Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle and ownership demeanour 
Partner with both Engineering, Technology and Product leadership to ensure strategies align 
Develop the best and mentor other senior engineering roles across the entire landscape 
Promote effective innovation across all of engineering 
Advocate and strategize for continuous industrialisation and product-minded tech capabilities 
Inspire ideas to foster purpose and mastery to engineering teams, leading them towards autonomy and maturity 
Amplify engineering teams by efficiently unblocking them with direction, leading upward, and establishing alignment 
Raise the profile of MS Tech through public content and contribution/creation into open-source technology 
Support recruitment, onboarding and internal and external brand outreach activities 

Tech Stack 

M&S uses a variety of technologies across the Food & International Food team and, as part of our modernization drive, will be introducing new ones. The sorts of technologies include:

Java, Micronaut, PL/SQL 
ReactJS, Next.js 
Azure Cloud, Dynatrace (observability) 
Mule, Kafka, MQ 
Blue Yonder Dispatcher 

Essential Experience

Significant track record of strategic and innovative thinking, as well as execution and implementation 
Specialist in clean code and implementation of design patterns for common problems. 
Depth of knowledge in Information Security, you can design, quality review and quality assure solutions and services with security controls embedded. 
Confident driving system design conversations, building systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity 
Able to analyse current processes, identify, and implement opportunities to optimise processes, and lead and develop a team of specialists to deliver service improvements 
Experience of using a variety of methods of prototyping. You know how to share methodologies and can mentor others. You look at strategic service design end to end 
Strong ability to influence industry-based models for the development of new technology applications. You develop effective implementation and procurement strategies, consistent with business needs. You ensure alignment to relevant technical strategies, policies, standards, and practices 
Strong understanding of quality assurance, testing quadrants and the testing pyramid, and how to apply them 
Ability to lead senior engineers and technical customers to a desired outcome, without prescribing it 
Authoritative skills at cloud computing (network, security, serverless, Kubernetes etc) and automation 
Experience with implementation of Observability and Reliability using market technologies (e.g.: New Relic) 
Good experience with Performance Engineering (load testing, derivations, tuning, core web vitals, page speed etc.) 
Expertise in reliability testing 
Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical 

Desirable Experience

Previous software engineering community leadership experience 
Professional presentation delivery at internal and external events 
An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker 
Advocate and experience of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery 
Advanced experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it 
Cares about the business and the bigger picture with significant prior examples 
Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences 
A senior leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership. 
Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s)