Principal Technical Architect

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 limit to where your FT career will take you.

The role

This is a new role in our Technology department. The successful post-holder will work across engineering teams responsible for the core platforms and subscription products. They will identify opportunities and work to enhance, simplify, and scale the architectures in line with our strategy and to meet the business’ needs. 

To date, software architecture is designed and defined by engineers within each product or platform team, and is generally a collaborative effort. Growing complexity in our business and constraints introduced by pressure on the publishing and news industries require us to be robust in choosing technologies, introducing standards, being consistent, and reusing components and services wherever possible. 

This role will ensure alignment on key domain areas for our business such as:

• How the content model, and the services surrounding it, is designed both for easy retrieval and presentation, and also for ML processing. 
• Optimising architectures and infrastructure to enhance and improve integrations between SaaS and in-house software solutions (specifically marketing, customer relationship management, and similar solutions).

Reporting directly to our Chief Technology Officer, this position suits someone who is self-directed, is an excellent communicator and has a proven ability to build relationships with colleagues and vendors. You will work closely with our Technical Directors, their engineering teams and your counterpart Data Architect. This position does not have any line management responsibilities and there are no immediate plans to expand the architecture team. It is a ‘Principal’ role in the sense that you will be leading our technical architecture in an individual contributor capacity.

Prior experience with full-stack application architecture is essential, whereas business systems architecture experience is preferred but not required.

Main responsibilities 

• Be a technical authority and ensure excellence in system architecture across the FT’s software platforms and product portfolio. 
• Identify strategic requirements across the portfolio, advising the CTO, Technical Directors, and senior engineers on technical roadmaps and migration plans.
• Assist development teams with the interpretation of platform, product and project requirements and translate these into solutions
• Ensure seamless integrations of domain models and components to facilitate efficient data and business flows across groups and existing architectures.
• Ensure that the infrastructure is fit for purpose to support the portfolio’s offering with appropriate resilience, performance and flexibility.
• Build effective relationships with product owners, engineering teams, external suppliers and stakeholders as required.
• Contribute to the evolution of the FT’s Technical Strategy, including setting patterns, standards, policies, and roadmaps, and incorporating relevant industry trends and technical developments. 

What we are looking for

• Demonstrable experience in a senior technical role, with responsibility for defining and developing high-volume, multi-tiered, horizontally scalable online software architectures.
• Technical knowledge of public cloud technologies. Experience assessing and selecting IaaS and PaaS solutions based on requirements and cost effectiveness.
• Technical knowledge and demonstrable experience of Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Domain Driven Design and Service Oriented Architectures, as well as experience conducting code and system reviews.
• Experience evaluating new technologies for their appropriateness, including assessing their strategic and/or tactical benefit.
• Demonstrable experience translating business and feature requirements into technical specifications, ideally including content management, online media production, publishing workflow tools and services, user personalisation services, and marketing / sales technology solutions.
• A grasp of existing and emerging technologies and their potential to enhance the performance and shape of technical architectures and systems.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience building effective relationships with a wide range of peers and colleagues, including working across organisational boundaries and leading capable and experienced developers without having direct management responsibility, and often in situations where divergent views are held.

Additional skills and experience we’re interested in are listed below. If you don’t have this experience yet, these are non-essential and we would still very much welcome an application from you.

• A background in software engineering, software design, content or data architecture, or database design and architecture.
• Experience breaking down large technical projects into smaller iterations to aid delivery and allow demonstration of incremental value.
• In-depth knowledge of data storage solutions ranging from data lakes, data warehouses, relational and nonrelational databases, columnar and graph databases.
• Experience of supplier management, particularly in evaluating technologies and SaaS solutions through competitive tendering processes.

Benefits

Our benefits vary depending on location, but we are committed to providing best in class perks across all our offices as well as an inclusive environment to develop your career. Examples of our benefits include; generous annual leave allowances, flexible working (including working from home), medical cover, enhanced maternity & paternity packages, subsidised gym memberships and Giving Back opportunities. Full details of our benefits can be found here.

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 talent@ft.com and a member of our team will be happy to help.

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