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This is an exciting 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 FT Specialist.
FT Specialist is entering a new era: we have a golden opportunity to renew our technology estate, use best practices, and 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.
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 ever-changing 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 recently published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Software Engineer relevant to this position
We often use these, it's not an exhaustive 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
Work within a team of engineers in an agile delivery team
Design and implement low maintenance, well-monitored, secure, and scalable solutions
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 best practice in other areas is understood and adopted where it makes sense to do so.
Develop an in-depth understanding of FT Specialist underlying data and data flow.
Essential
Good command of written and spoken English
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
Willingness to move to NodeJS
Cloud infrastructure: (AWS, Heroku, GCP, or similar)
Databases, Document stores, and search technologies like MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB or ElasticSearch
Message queues like Kinesis, SQS, Kafka, etc.
Good understanding of the principles and trade-offs of a microservices architecture
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
Experience working within an environment where operational support and monitoring of code and systems is part of the culture (DevOps)
An understanding of CDNs and the role they play is web application architecture. e.g.Fastly, Cloudfront, Akamai etc.
Experience with developing Salesforce Applications using APEX
Experience with backend Java development using frameworks like Vert.X
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
Being an active member of the broader technology community with an understanding and passion for the current leading trends
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace
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 believe that a supportive workplace is one where employees feel they can be themselves at work and have the flexibility they need to meet their personal needs.
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 contact [email protected] and a member of our team will be happy to help.
