Data Platform Architect

Summary

M&S is harnessing the power of data. We’re using data analytics, data science and artificial intelligence to address 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 Platform Architect who will work closely with key internal partners to understand, own the road map, and prioritise key platform capabilities, maintain our data capability framework, and lead the safe evolution of our technical architecture to meet our evolving needs. This includes capabilities for self-serve analytics and insights, data engineering, machine learning, data visualisation, data provisioning services/APls, data catalogue, data quality, AI, and data security.

This role will be pivotal in ensuring our data platform evolves to capitalise on new technology opportunities, and to meet the evolving needs of all business areas at M&S (Foods, Clothing & Home Finance, Marketing, Dotcom, Supply Chain, HR, etc). You will be part of a collaborative Data Technology team, and the successful candidate will also work with owners of our Data Governance and Data Analytics functions, as well as with our colleagues in the wider architecture community at 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, 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

Own, drive, and promote our data platform road map. Provide a structured approach to gathering and prioritising key capabilities for M&S Data Platform. Work with relevant stakeholders to understand their needs, and help them to specify capabilities and evaluation criteria against which existing & potential tooling can be assessed. Maintain up-to-date assessment of our capabilities, highlighting where action required to evolve and/or enhance our data tooling. Assist in the creation of a business justification where investment is required. Provide marketplace assessment of available tools, present options, support proofs of technology, and make tooling recommendations. Develop and maintain a tooling roadmap for the data platform, aligned to business needs. Apply standard, tool-agnostic considerations (scalability, availability, resilience, portability, security, to support tooling assessments. Collaborate with our established strategic partners to understand their product roadmaps, and any challenges or opportunities they present. Interact with potential tooling provider to ensure M&S data capability needs and priorities are understood, and to elevate our offerings as a business. Interact with M&S enterprise architecture community to ensure data portfolio remains aligned with enterprise decisions and feed into enterprise discussions. Provide implementation guidance to our Infrastructure team. Handle the workload and relevant priorities of any platform architects that may be temporarily or permanently aligned to this role.

Who you are

Experience of using a standardised approach to tooling assessment & selection. Highly familiar with the capabilities required to provide a secure, scalable, performant, functionally-rich data platform. Experience of Analytics and Reporting standard methodologies and tools. Articulable understanding of Data Engineering and Governance standard processes and methodologies. Understanding of enterprise security requirements and techniques. Knowledge of enterprise application development and software engineering. Experience of presenting technology proposals (including costs/benefits) to non-technical senior business partners. Excellent written and verbal communications skills. Understanding and/or experience of DevOps and CICD using components like GlT, Azure DevOps, or Jenkins, etc. would be a bonus, but is not essential. Understanding of ML practices and technologies would be a bonus, but is not essential. Solution architecture of end-to-end environments in the data technology space mainly on Azure would be a bonus, but is not essential. Understanding of the capabilities supported by DataBricks would be a bonus, but is not essential. Experience designing cloud (preferably Azure) data environment components including data storage (structured and unstructured), compute engines, metadata management concepts, orchestration Lineage, logging, etc. would be a bonus, but is not essential.

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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