Summary

M&S is harnessing the power of data. We're using data analytics, data science and artificial intelligence to solve business problems, improve the customer experience, and drive commercial value. This role sits within the M&S Data Architecture & Design team, where we are enhancing our cloud-hosted (Azure) data platform to meet a growing dependency on these capabilities.

We are looking for an experienced Data Solutions Architect to provide architecture and design guidance across our portfolio of data projects. You will use your retail knowledge and design experience to guide projects developed within our data portfolio, and to manage impacts on our data estate caused by change initiatives elsewhere within M&S.

To stay close to customers, our support teams are in the office three days a week as we believe that skills are developed through collaboration, and that spending time together makes us more creative and connected.

What's in it for you

Being a part of M&S is exactly that - playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We're an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever-evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, and service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.

Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special:

• After completing your probationary period, you'll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third-party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry-leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

What you'll do

• Drive the design of data solutions on our cloud-based data platform that support each of our business units in modernising decision making through data.
• Represent the data platform on major organisation-wide transformation programmes, supporting the whole data development systems life cycle from inception to implementation with data platform solution design and architecture expertise.
• Provide thought leadership, interacting with various M&S teams (e.g., platform product owners, analytics team leads, data science team, internal business partners, Digital & Data leadership team, architects, Ops engineers, software engineers) to understand data use cases and requirements, and proposing design patterns and solution designs.
• Responsible for managing the technical design for components of the BEAM platform ensuring that scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and elasticity are considered.
• Contribute to POCs and RFPs to fairly assess and select suitable tools to improve our platform.
• Own the architecture backlog and progress discussions relating to design decisions, standardised principles, and new features/patterns/capabilities.
• Collaborate with our strategic partners, inputting into future roadmaps for data technology and tools.
• Support the estimation, sizing and impact assessment of new solutions against current and target roadmap data architecture.

Who you are

• Experience of designing secure, scalable, performant, functionally-rich data solutions in a complex environment.
• Experience of data warehouse, data lake and lake house solutions.
• Understanding of Analytics and Reporting, Data Engineering and Data Governance methodologies and technologies.
• Understanding of enterprise security requirements and techniques along with enterprise application development and software engineering.
• Creating Key Design Principles (KDPs) and Key Design Decisions (KDDs).
• Presenting technology proposals (including costs/benefits) to non-technical senior team members with the ability to gather, assimilate and document details of a complex data and technology estate.

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.

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