Staff Software Engineer – Experimentation

Overview

In this role you will help scale and evolve the experimentation platform that powers product, engineering, and content teams to run more experiments safely and confidently. You set technical direction, build backend-focused capabilities, and drive a self-service model across the organization. You mentor engineers, prioritize observability and resilience, and document APIs and standards to enable broad adoption. You play a pivotal role in shaping how experimentation is modeled and accessed at scale.

Pay / Benefits

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products
• Competitive holiday allowance
• Strong pension and life assurance
• Tailored induction and training
• M&S Choices portal perks
• Family policies (parental/adoption/neonatal leave) 24/7 wellbeing support

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve backend platform capabilities for experimentation (APIs, services, automation, tooling)
• Set technical direction for the Experimentation platform and influence architecture and standards
• Champion a self-service platform model with automation and AI-enabled tooling to reduce toil
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and content teams to understand needs and future demand
• Mentor engineers to develop platform thinking and engineering craft
• Maintain a production-first mindset focusing on observability, resilience, and safe change
• Produce clear, high-quality documentation for APIs, systems, standards, and operations

Key requirements

• Deep backend engineering experience with Java/Kotlin and distributed systems in production
• Strong experience on the Azure cloud platform
• Solid understanding of experimentation solutions (Optimizely a strong plus)
• Hands-on GraphQL experience (schema design, federation, evolution, API governance)
• Working knowledge of TypeScript and React in API/tools/integration contexts

• Collaborative mindset
• Mentorship and coaching
• Cross-functional partnership
• Java/Kotlin backend development
• Distributed systems in production
• Azure cloud services

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