Principal Engineer - Edge Delivery & Observability

About us

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading business news organisations, recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. The FT has a record paying readership of one million, three-quarters of which are digital subscriptions. It is part of Nikkei Inc., which provides a broad range of information, news and services for the global business community.

We have offices in more than 35 cities, including London, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Manila, Sofia, San Francisco and Tokyo. Join us and find an inclusive and fast-paced environment with unique opportunities to support every step of your career.

The FT is looking for a Principal Engineer (Individual Contributor) to lead our Edge Delivery & Observability work.

About the teams

There are two teams in this area.

The Edge Delivery & Observability (EDO) team looks after the cloud edge capabilities like CDNs, DNS etc, along with the monitoring and observability infrastructure at the FT.

Examples of the kind of work this team tackles are:

• Managing and improving our central solution for observability tools like Graphite, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus and Cloudflare.
• Providing self service APIs and tools that enable other delivery teams to utilise the monitoring solutions.
• Providing support to other delivery teams at the FT and helping them utilise core SaaS infrastructure products effectively.
• Ensuring our solutions have high engineering standards (robust, fit for purpose, include synthetic testing and/or application monitoring) and meet our quality standards.

The API Gateway team is a contract team, based in Bulgaria, who work on our API Gateway stack. This is built on top of Tyk, an open source API Gateway.

Both teams are part of the Infrastructure & Operations Group at the Financial Times. We have a devops culture of empowered teams who take full responsibility for their systems. Infrastructure & Operations purpose: “We keep the business running. Our job is to support and deliver fast, reliable, and cost-effective technology - so our FT colleagues can do their best work. We are responsive, we support change, and always aim for high performance. When we’re at our best, the whole business runs better.”

About the role

Principal Engineers provide technical direction and support to teams across the group. Each principal engineer looks after one or two feature teams, leading them to deliver quality tooling and products that reduce developer toil for all engineering teams at the FT.

In addition to steering their immediate teams, Principal Engineers play a key role in the management of the department,

• Work closely with the people manager within the teams
• Engage with other disciplines (e.g.delivery, product management) and teams across FT to make sure we are all working together effectively
• Model and help set and reinforce our inclusive, respectful, multidisciplinary and open culture
• Help continuously improve our technology, process and culture, take ownership of problems and see solutions through to completion
• Manage and maintain strong relationships with vendors
• Gain a deep understanding of the FT as a business and use that knowledge to communicate clearly with your peers, reports, and senior management
• Actively collaborate across teams both within and outside of I&O
• Contribute to company-wide processes, frameworks, and guidelines

About you

• You love collaborating with others to solve technical problems.
• You have experience technically leading teams and projects.
• You are an effective communicator, able to break down tasks as well as giving/receiving constructive feedback.
• You are customer focused, with a strong focus on building and running reliable, stable and secure systems.
• You are enthusiastic about operability & monitoring of systems and Cloud infrastructure.

The tech we work with

We don’t expect you to have worked with all of these, but if you have experience of these or equivalent tools, that will be a benefit

• Cloud platform: AWS
• Observability and monitoring tools: Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus
• CDN: Cloudflare
• DNS: Route53
• Python and Go

Benefits

We have many great benefits. Some standout ones are:

• A competitive bonus incentive scheme.

• Extensive learning and development opportunities including 10% time, tech talks, internal conferences and opportunities to attend external conferences and training.

• 25 days annual leave, increasing to 30 days after 2 years’ service.

• Generous parental leave

• Very competitive pension plan, with the company doubling your contribution.

We currently operate a hybrid model which requires staff to work onsite 50% of the time, subject to role requirements & regular review. While flexible working requests will be considered, not all patterns are suitable for all roles. We believe this balanced approach supports flexibility and protects our culture, making collaboration and communication easier, building stronger relationships and team cohesion, and supporting peer learning. We reserve discretion on reasonable notice to change this approach either generally or for specific individuals or teams.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace

At the FT, 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 committed to equality of opportunity. We are determined to create a diverse group at all levels of our Company and we welcome all members of the community we serve to apply for openings with us.

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