The role

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. This is an exciting opportunity for a Senior Software Engineer to join as part of the Product & Technology organisation within the Financial Times.

Position summary

You will have the autonomy to select the tools and technologies you need to build and operate services responsible for FT 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.

The Community Team takes care of some of the most important Events businesses integrations and has the really interesting challenge on how we can connect our audiences and by doing that we cross-sell our subscription businesses with events, trainings and form a new community platform.

You will be responsible for delivering innovative technical solutions as you build and operate world class platforms. You will have the autonomy, within defined guard rails, to select the tools and technologies you need to build and operate services.

We have recently 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 an exhaustive list but gives you a taste of what our technology stack and tools look like:

• AWS

• Node.js

• SASS or Less

• GraphQL

• Heroku

• Webpack

• Rollup

• Parcel

The hiring process

We understand that tech interviews are often stressful for no good reason, so we designed our interview process to be rigorous but friendly. We have tech tests requiring minimal code writing and algorithms understanding, a friendly system design exercise and a set of questions to encourage you to tell us about your strengths and what makes you happy at work.
We're committed to equality and diversity in the tech industry, so we'll be especially happy to see applications from under-represented backgrounds. We encourage this by considering flexible working hours as well as tuning the hiring process to promote diversity.

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

• Work directly with product owners and more senior engineers to fully shape solutions from inception to deployment and beyond
• Work within a team of engineers in an agile delivery team
• Design and implement low maintenance, well monitored, secure and scalable solutions, from cradle to grave
• Understand and play an active part in designing the architecture, tooling and release cycle processes used by the engineering teams across Product & Technology
• Contribute to company-wide processes, frameworks and guidelines
• Develop a close relationship with our customers and provide operational support.

The ideal candidate profile is:

Essential

• Good command of written and spoken English
• Object oriented programming knowledge
• Good understanding of the fundamentals of front end development. This includes knowledge of html, Javascript and CSS. We do not use any particular framework on the front-end, but rather want you to have a good understanding of the Web APIs
• Hands-on experience with CSS pre-processors is a plus and we do not have a preference for SASS or Less (we are using SASS)
• In-depth knowledge of Javascript will be something that we expect from you because we are making use of Node.js as a preferred runtime for our server-side code. It is good to know that most of our pages are server-side rendered and not bootstrapped on the client.ex
• Experience with module bundlers such as Webpack, Rollup, and Parcel
• Good understanding of what are the different attack vectors and how to mitigate them in order to produce secure software
• Understanding how applications are deployed - this includes the API layer, DBs and FE
• Understanding of how to property scale, maintain, secure and operationalise the application that you have worked on
• Understanding of how to monitor your application stack and to alert in case of problem
• Good understanding of how to track performance problems, both client-side and on the backend, and to put in place solutions to mitigate them
• Knowledge of using a content delivery network (CDN), if you have experience with fastly, cloudfront, cloudflare or any other CDN provider will be considered a plus
• Hands-on experience in designing or working with distributed systems. A good understanding of the notable differences between a monolith application and microservice architecture
• Integrations with third-party systems.

Desirable

• Experience in an environment where operational support and monitoring of code and systems is part of the culture (DevOps)

• Experience designing and developing RESTful APIs

• Experience with any cloud providers - we are working with AWS and Heroku, but will consider a plus experience with any other cloud provider.

• Experience with setting up SSO integrations.

We can't wait to meet you!