Full Stack Engineer (Node/React)

About FT Product & Technology

Here at the FT, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500-people strong, our Product and 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 FT Specialist Group

FT Specialist group is a key part of the business, providing significant revenue and contribution to the FT. This is an exciting time for Specialist Titles as we are establishing a large multi-functional product & technology team in Sofia to support the needs of the business and build a modern sustainable technology stack that will underpin the success for years to come. FT Specialist brings together a portfolio of niche digital publications, including ones with more than 160 years of tradition.

Working in the FT Specialist team you will be responsible for delivering innovative technical solutions as you build and operate world class platforms underpinning the Financial Times strategic business models. Someone who is comfortable with the constantly evolving technical landscape and is keen to contribute to the company’s processes and broader know-how would thrive in this role.

We have published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies relevant to this position.

For our tech stack we often use:

JavaScript (TS), React, GraphQL, Node.js, CircleCI, Terraform, Fastly, Heroku, AWS, Splunk, Grafana.

It’s not a comprehensive list but gives you a taste of what our technology stack and tools look like.

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

• Work directly with senior partners and product owners to fully shape solutions from inception to deployment and beyond.
• Provide technical leadership to an engineering team.
• Help with technical decision-making to support the technology strategy.
• Aid and support personal development of more junior team-members.
• Develop and maintain an understanding of the business domains within FT Specialist. Use that understanding to shape the development of the platforms you build.
• Work within the department’s strategy and guardrails, and contribute to their ongoing refinement.
• Have a practical approach to working with a large portfolio of products that maximise a diverse range of technologies.
• Communicate widely within the organisation to ensure standard process in other areas is understood and adopted where it makes sense to do so.
• Develop an in-depth understanding of FT Specialist underlying data and data flow.

Candidate profile:

Essential

• Extensive experience using the wide range of technologies and patterns required to build modern web products and services along with the tools that enable their creation.
• Deep knowledge of at least one programming language.
• Flexibility with technologies and willingness to work with our tech stack.
• Cloud infrastructure: AWS, Heroku, GCP, or similar
• Databases, Document stores, and search technologies like MariaDB, ElasticSearch, MongoDB or MySQL.
• Message queues like Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, etc.
• Good understanding of the principles and trade-offs of a microservices architecture
• Application performance tuning and optimisation.
• Understanding of CI and CD delivery pipelines like CircleCI or Jenkins.
• Designing for fault tolerance and high availability.
• Writing automated unit and end-to-end tests – with best practice in mind.
• Able to balance the customer and business product needs with those needed to build high quality products.
• Understand the importance of diversity and equality in a well functioning team.
• Be able to communicate clearly and concisely with audiences of varying backgrounds.
• Good command of written and spoken English.

Desirable

• Experience working within an environment where operational support and monitoring of code and systems is part of the culture (DevOps.)
• An understanding of CDNs and the role they play is web application architecture. e.g.Fastly, Cloudfront, Akamai etc.
• Instrumenting for observability and operability
• Understand how to build and maintain APIs
• How to design software to support easy scaling using a methodology like the 12 factor app
• Being an active member of the broader technology community with an understanding and passion of the current leading trends
• Being a leader with solid organisational and time management skills

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 [email protected] and a member of our team will be happy to help.