Full Stack Engineer – FT Specialist

About us

Here at the Financial Times, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500-people strong, our Product and Tech team keeps us ahead of the constantly evolving digital world by delivering innovative products to over one million digital subscribers every day. Our growth plans rely on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists – everyone’s welcome in this friendly, forward-thinking team. And with ambitious spirit, intelligence and opportunity at every turn, there’s no limits to where your FT career will take you.

Position Summary 

This is a great opportunity for an engineer to join the FT Specialist group as part of the Product & Technology organisation within FT.

A key part of the business, providing significant revenue and contribution to the FT, is Specialist Titles. This is an exciting time for Specialist Titles as we are creating a large new cross functional product & technology team in Sofia to support the needs of this part of the business. FT Specialist is entering a new era. We have a golden opportunity to renew our technology estate, to use standard methodologies and to build a modern sustainable technology stack that will underpin the success of the business for years to come.

FT Specialist brings together a portfolio of niche digital publications, including ones with more than 160 years of tradition.

• Investors’ Chronicle
• The Banker
• FT Adviser

You will have the autonomy to select the tools and technologies you need to build and operate services responsible for FT Specialist brand critical capabilities. Someone who is comfortable with the constantly evolving technical landscape and is keen to contribute to the company’s processes and broader know-how would thrive in this role.

Working in the FT Specialist team you will be responsible for delivering innovative technical solutions as you build and operate world class platforms to grow the Financial Times strategic business models.

We have published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Software Engineer relevant to this position.

The Tech Stack

We often use these, it’s not a comprehensive list but gives you a taste of what our technology stack and tools look like:

• JavaScript, React, GraphQL, Node.js, CircleCI, Fastly, Heroku, AWS, Splunk

This role will be right for you if you are happy to:

• Help with technical decision-making to support the technology strategy
• Aid and support personal development of more junior team-members
• Develop and maintain an understanding of the business domains within FT Specialist. Use that understanding to shape the development of the platforms you build.
• Work within the department’s strategy and guardrails, and contribute to their ongoing refinement.
• Have a practical approach to working with a large portfolio of products that leverage a diverse range of technologies.
• Communicate widely within the organisation to ensure standard process in other areas is understood and adopted where it makes sense to do so.

Essential skills and experience

• Extensive experience using the wide range of technologies and patterns required to build modern web products and services along with the tools that enable their creation.
  • Deep knowledge of at least one programming language
  • JavaScript, React, GraphQL, Node.js
  • Cloud infrastructure: (AWS, Heroku, GCP or similar)
  • Marketing Technology platforms e.g. Bloomreach
  • Editorial Technology e.g. CMS and Event Management Platforms
  • Databases, document stores, search technologies and data warehouses like MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, BigQuery or Redshift
  • Message queues like Kinesis, SQS etc.
• Application performance tuning and optimisation.
• Understanding of CI and CD delivery pipelines like CircleCI or Jenkins
• Designing for fault tolerance
• Writing automated unit and end-to-end tests – with best practice in mind – for feature development
• Able to balance the customer and business product needs with those needed to build high quality products.
• Understand the importance of diversity and equality in a well functioning team
• Be able to communicate clearly and concisely

Desirable skills and experience 

• An understanding of CDNs and the role they play is web application architecture. e.g.Fastly, Cloudfront, Akamai etc.
• Instrumenting for observability and operability
• Understand how to build and maintain APIs
• How to design software to support easy scaling using a methodology like the 12 factor app

In Return, We Can Offer You

• Annual bonus scheme
• 25 days paid leave
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program
• Life Insurance
• Enhanced Parental Leave policy
• Food Allowance
• Multisport Card
• Both in house and external training programs
• Your own training dedicated budget (for conferences, courses etc.)

Further Information

The FT is committed to providing an inclusive working environment for all. We are an equal opportunities employer who seeks to recruit and appoint the best talent regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We have implemented a hybrid working model and we also promote flexible working and will consider specific requests around flexibility for all roles where it can be accommodated. Please let us know if you require any adjustments as part of the application process or to enable you to attend an interview. If you would like to discuss your requirements, or have any questions, please send an email and a member of our team will be happy to help.

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