Principal Software Engineer - Personalisation

As a Principal Engineer at Marks & Spencer, you will shape the technical direction for the Personalisation product group and align software decisions with business aims. You’ll lead architecture and engineering standards across personalization, search, and recommendations, partnering with cross-functional teams. You’ll design scalable ML-powered features and mentor engineers to raise capability and quality. This is a chance to influence customer experiences at scale and drive engineering excellence in a dynamic retail environment.

• 20% colleague discount after probation
• competitive holiday entitlement
• discretionary bonus schemes
• Defined Contribution Pension Scheme
• comprehensive training programmes
• wellbeing support and 24/7 Virtual GP

• Define and drive technical strategy, architecture, and engineering standards across the Personalisation domain
• Design and deliver scalable systems supporting personalisation, search, recommendations, and ML-powered features
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Design to deliver customer-centric solutions
• Lead and influence technical decision-making across multiple teams and platforms
• Mentor and support senior engineers, helping to raise the overall engineering capability
• Improve engineering quality, reliability, and productivity through best practices, tooling, and platform enhancements

• Strong background in Java/Python and large-scale production systems
• Experience with Machine Learning systems and collaboration with Data Science teams
• Skilled in system design and architecture for scalable, high-quality solutions
• Comfortable working across cross-functional environments with multiple stakeholders
• Passion for growing others and driving engineering excellence
• Strong communicator capable of influencing technical and business decisions

• Cross-functional collaboration
• Mentoring and leadership
• Strategic communication
• Java
• Python
• Large-scale production systems