Senior Engineering Manager, Commerce

INTRODUCTION

At Burberry, we believe creativity opens spaces. Our purpose is to unlock the power of imagination to push boundaries and open new possibilities for our people, our customers and our communities. This is the core belief that has guided Burberry since it was founded in 1856 and is central to how we operate as a company today.  

We aim to provide an environment for creative minds from different backgrounds to thrive, bringing a wide range of skills and experiences to everything we do. As a purposeful, values-driven brand, we are committed to being a force for good in the world as well, creating the next generation of sustainable luxury for customers, driving industry change and championing our communities.

JOB PURPOSE

The Senior Engineering Manager provides technical leadership across one or more scrums within a Digital product domain, accountable for the quality, pace, and standards of engineering output. The role sits over one or multiple scrums comprised of engineering and delivery roles, ensuring development practices are consistent, code quality is maintained, and third-party resources are effectively managed and challenged. The Senior Engineering Manager works closely with Solution Architects, Product Managers, and Senior Delivery Managers to ensure what is built is technically sound, scalable, and aligned to enterprise architectural guardrails.

Please note we are recruting for 3x Senior Engineering Manager covering Commerce, Content & Fulfilment.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide technical leadership to their scrums, setting and enforcing development standards, code quality expectations, and engineering best practices for both permanent and third-party engineering resources.


• Provide robust engineering estimates and capacity assessments to the Product Manager, enabling informed prioritisation and trade-off decisions. Ensure the Product Manager has a clear and transparent view of what is achievable within each sprint and planning horizon, and flag risks to commitments early.


• Contribute to demand shaping and backlog refinement alongside the Product Manager and Solution Architect, providing early technical feasibility assessment, complexity indication, and risk identification to ensure backlog items are realistic and well-understood before entering sprint delivery.


• Own the engineering approach for delivery of backlog items within the domain, making day-to-day technical decisions on implementation within the guardrails set by solution architects - and taking accountability for those decisions in terms of quality, maintainability, and technical debt implications.


• Oversee engineering delivery across the domain, ensuring sprint commitments are achievable, technical dependencies are managed, and delivery pace is sustained.


• Manage and challenge third-party partners within the scrums, scrutinising estimates, technical approach, and quality of output to ensure Burberry is getting value from its delivery partners.


• Own the relationship with technology solution vendors within the domain, ensuring service performance, technical performance, roadmap alignment and agreed service expectations are met. Lead regular vendor performance reviews and QBRs in partnership with Product, Delivery, Architecture, Procurement and relevant business stakeholders, and maintain oversight of contract renewals, extensions and material commercial changes, ensuring these are identified and progressed in a timely manner.


• Work closely with solution architects to ensure technical designs are translated into deliverable engineering plans, and that implementation aligns to agreed architectural patterns and enterprise guardrails.


• Coordinate engineers and delivery roles across scrums, ensuring the right skills and capacity are deployed against backlog priorities, escalating resourcing gaps to the Senior Delivery Manager.


• Own the technical quality of the scrum's output, including oversight of code reviews, testing coverage, release readiness, and production stability of delivered changes.


• Play an active role in agile ceremonies across assigned scrums - contributing technical input to sprint planning and backlog refinement, ensuring engineering readiness for committed work, presenting delivery outputs in sprint reviews, and driving engineering improvement actions through retrospectives.


• Take accountability for production support and incident resolution within the domain, ensuring engineering teams respond promptly to production issues, root causes are identified, and fixes are delivered - minimising business impact and feeding lessons learned back into engineering practices.


• Identify and drive opportunities for engineering innovation and improvement in line with the Tech Forward Digital Strategy - including automation, reusable components, shift-left testing, platform simplification, and emerging technologies (including AI and agentic capabilities) that can accelerate delivery, reduce cost, or enhance the digital product.


• Partners closely with our Security function to establish secure code practices and manages adherence to agreed security standards.

PERSONAL PROFILE

• Proven experience in an engineering leadership, technical lead, or lead developer role within a technology delivery environment.


• Strong technical depth across relevant technology stacks, with the ability to credibly scrutinise partner engineering output and challenge estimates.


• Experienced in managing mixed engineering teams of permanent staff and third-party delivery partners.


• Comfortable with both hands-on technical oversight and people/delivery leadership responsibilities.


• Effective communicator able to translate technical complexity into clear language for product and delivery stakeholders.


• Proactive in driving engineering standards, quality practices, and continuous improvement across scrums.


• Familiarity with modern development practices including CI/CD, automated testing, and agile delivery.


• Experience with one or more of Burberry's core platform technologies (e.g. SAP, Salesforce, Contentstack, Databricks, integration middleware) is preferred.