About FT Product & Technology
Here at the Financial Times, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500-people strong, our Product & Tech team keeps us ahead of the ever-changing digital landscape by delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers every day. Our plans for growth 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 entrepreneurial spirit, intelligence and opportunity at every turn, there’s no limits to where your FT career will take you.
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace
At the FT, we aim for employees across all regions to have a voice so that diverse perspectives are heard and valued. 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. We'll continue to remove barriers for all, and in particular barriers facing employees from underrepresented groups
The Financial Times is looking for an Engineer to join the Engineering Insights team. This is a hands-on development role, contributing to the tools our engineering teams use to improve our operational reliability.
Projects you might work on
The Engineering Insights team vision is to "Provide the knowledge and guidance to help engineers build awesome products". In 2023 we'll be building on our innovative set of tools for gathering and disseminating information. We're an agile, customer driven team, constantly adapting to what we learn, but some ideas for 2023 include:
- Address alert fatigue by reconciling messaging for engineers into one coordinated notification centre
- Improving user journeys from learning of an issue to fixing it by combining data with documentation and tooling
- Expanding our interconnected graph of data about our estate further to give engineers access to even more knowledge at their fingertips
If you’re interested in learning about the bigger picture of how a tech department operates, and are passionate about solving problems that have a wide impact, then joining Engineering Insights would be a great career move.
We often use the following technologies, it’s not an exhaustive list but gives you a taste of what our stack and tools look like:
- Node.js,
- GraphQL
- Neo4j + a variety of other data stores
- Web platform (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM)
- AWS
- React
Main Duties and Responsibilities
- Contribute robust, well-tested and secure code which helps us to solve business problems
- Interact with the users of our tools, building a culture where everything we deliver is well-crafted and user-focused
- Own the development of functionality from requirements (typically expressed as user journeys or similar) through to operating in production
- Manage own workload, and collaborate as part of an agile team of engineers
- Collaborate with other team members through review and mentoring
- Take part in onboarding and knowledge sharing
- Line managing junior members of the team (optional)
Skills and Experience needed for the role
Required
- A keen focus on customer needs and collaborative attitude
- Experience contributing to product & delivery decisions
- Good programming skills, preferably in Node.js and the web platform (CSS, JavaScript, HTML)
- Excellent communication skills
- Hands on experience with AWS (or a comparable cloud platform), especially CloudFormation, IAM and Lambda
- Demonstrable automated testing skills, with exposure to a range of mocking techniques and frameworks
Desired
- Experience operating as well as building systems
- Experience modelling data (e.g. database schemas or knowledge graphs)
- Experience designing APIs (including GraphQL) and working with microservices
- Experience setting up continuous delivery pipelines and related tools
- Experience with a range of data storage options
- Experience setting up and configuring JavaScript build and test tools (e.g. Webpack, Jest, ESLint)
Benefits
- 25 days of leave, increasing to 30 after two years. We also offer additional flexi-days at 30% pay.
- Pension scheme: the FT will double your contribution up to 18% total
- Free gym membership via GymPass, or subsidised access to Nuffield Health
- Enhanced maternity & paternity packages
- Other schemes include: childcare vouchers, give as you earn, cycle to work, travel loans, healthcare, dental, life assurance
- Full details of our benefits can be found here.
How we work
We offer a strict 35 hour working week to all staff in our London office. Our hybrid setup means staff are expected to come into the office 2 days a week on average. Each team is given some choice on how they organise themselves and may set specific days for the team to be in the office, but broadly speaking, this will be no more than two days a week.
Our office is located across the street from St. Paul's Cathedral and is easily accessible from all corners of London. There are the main train terminals such as Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Blackfriars, City Thameslink or Waterloo all situated within walking distance or there are several tube stations within a few mins walk such as Mansion House (District or Circle line), St. Paul's (Central line), Bank (Central or Waterloo & City line) or Barbican (Central, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines).
