Lead Software Engineer - Content Discovery

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.

About the team

The Customer Products group works on our award winning website, iOS and Android apps.

We are a set of multi-disciplinary teams primarily based in London and this is the chance to be one of the funding members of our new Sofia-based team. We value transparency, accountability, shared responsibility and teamwork. We’re focused on our users and the FT’s mission to provide engaging world-class journalism.

Most engineers work across the entire stack, although many have expertise with particular technologies and domains, for example client-side, performance, accessibility, building APIs, security and integration. We deploy to production many times a day and have full ownership of releases, the tools we use and site reliability.

This role is a Senior 2 level engineering position according to our competency framework. Put simply, Senior 2 is a tech lead and people management level role in FT.

What you’ll work on

• Develop new features for FT.com and our mobile apps using modern web technologies

• Collaborate with Product Owners, Delivery Managers, and UX Designers, contributing ideas to help achieve our company-wide goals

• Maintain our high standards for web performance, security and accessibility

• Help improve the way we work and the tools we use

Our technology

Here’s a list of things we use a lot. It’s not exhaustive, but gives you a taste of what our stack and tools look like:

• React, Node.js; Heroku; AWS Lambda, Kinesis, and DynamoDB

• Elasticsearch; Neo4j; Redis; GraphQL; Postgres

• Handlebars; Sass; Webpack; Preact

• Fastly and VCL

• Github; CircleCI;

• Open Telemetry; Grafana; Splunk

We don’t expect you to have worked with all of these, it will be a bonus for us if you have worked with some of them.

To find out more you can read about how we route traffic on FT.com and have a look a the code we make public on GitHub. You can also get an insight into how we work from our FT Product & Technology Medium publication.

About you

Your core skill set and expertise is web development and you're enthusiastic about contributing to all parts of the process.

Our ideal candidate will bring a unique point of view to the work that we do. We firmly believe that diverse perspectives help us create a great product and enhance the team.

Characteristics we value

• Keen to take action whilst being pragmatic

• Attention to detail and common sense

• Being data-driven, when it matters

• Being collaborative

• Enjoy learning and teaching — whether that be pair programming, lightning talks, good documentation, leading workshops or mentoring more junior members of the team

• A love of the web, an interest performance and dedication to accessibility

• An understanding of design and UX principles

• An avoidance of frameworks, to get things done you prefer the tools that are right for the use case and frameworks only where necessary.

Our 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 don’t do whiteboard coding or peer over your shoulder when you’re writing code.

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 for example by considering part time roles and flexible working hours as well as tuning the hiring process to promoting diversity.

We have published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Software Engineer.

What it’s like to work in Customer Products

Customer Products has over fifty engineers working in small cross-functional teams with opportunities to rotate to other teams.

We ensure engineers have the tools they need. People are free to choose the OS and device type that suits them, and we encourage exploration of new tools and techniques. We support informal knowledge sharing alongside more formal training opportunities.

Benefits

• Annual bonus scheme

• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program

• 25 days annual paid leave

• Private Health Insurance

• Life Insurance

• Enhanced Parental Leave policy

• Food Vouchers

• Multisport Card

• Work-life balance and work from home practice

• Both in house and external training programs

• Your own training dedicated budget (for conferences, courses etc.)

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 a member of our HR team who will be happy to help.

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