The Role
The Customer Products group works on our award winning website, iOS and Android apps. We are a multi-disciplinary team based in London, UK and Sofia, Bulgaria. 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.
What you'll work on
- Define and maintain service templates, golden paths, and internal developer tooling that reduce cognitive load and accelerate product delivery.Design, build, and operate shared platforms and services that product teams depend on (e.g. CI/CD pipelines, deployment infrastructure, observability, service meshes, feature flagging).
- Partner closely with product engineering teams to understand their pain points, gather requirements, and deliver platform capabilities that solve real problems.
- Own the reliability and scalability of platform services, including on call responsibilities, incident response, and capacity planning.
- Establish and champion engineering standards for infrastructure as code, configuration management, security, and cost optimisation.
- Evaluate and integrate third party tools and cloud services, making pragmatic build vs buy decisions.
- Contribute to platform roadmap planning and communicate trade offs clearly to both technical and non technical stakeholders.
- Mentor junior and mid level engineers, conducting code reviews and fostering a culture of operational excellence.
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:
- Typescript; Node.js; AWS ECS; AWS Lambda, Kinesis, and DynamoDB
- Elasticache; GraphQL
- Handlebars; Sass; Webpack; Preact
- Cloudflare Workers; Terraform
- Github; CircleCI; Cloudsmith
- OpenTelemetry; 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.
About you
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience across the stack. Some experience in a platform, infrastructure, or DevOps focused role is a bonus.
- Strong proficiency in Javascript and/or Typescript.
- Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, IAM, compute, and managed services.
- Hands on experience with containers, infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), and CI/CD tooling.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts: service discovery, load balancing, message queues, caching, and observability (metrics, logs, traces).
- A product mindset: you think of other engineers as your customers and obsess over developer experience.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across teams without direct authority.
- A bias towards automation, self service, and reducing toil.
- A willingness to leverage advancements in AI assisted coding to improve personal productivity and operational toil.
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
- Action oriented and pragmatic
- Strong problem solving skills
- Attention to detail
- Being collaborative
- Enjoy learning
What's in it for you? Our benefits
Our benefits vary by location but we are committed to providing best in class perks across all our offices. These include generous annual leave, medical cover, inclusive parental leave packages, subsidised gym memberships and opportunities to give back to the community.
We've embraced a 50% hybrid working model (averaging two to three days onsite) that fosters trust and remote adaptability while encouraging in person camaraderie and peer learning. Additionally, we are open to accommodating specific flexible working pattern requests for all roles where feasible.
Accessibility
We are a disability confident employer and Valuable 500 signatory.
Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments/personalisation 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, email and a member of our team will be happy to help.