Senior II Software Engineer - FT Professional

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 the Professional team

Our Professional product group is relatively new, and growing fast, and consists of a portfolio of services to support business (B2B) customers of the FT, ranging from individuals and start-ups to the world’s biggest companies. Our vision for Professional includes intuitive dashboards and tools empowering customers to manage licences and access across platforms, with  content and experiences personalised to their company, industry and interests, and new tools to support individuals and teams to discover, research and share content. We are also developing new products in data and in education - all part of our mission to be our audience’s partner in information and professional development, from classroom to boardroom.

Our Professional products portfolio currently consists of three core product teams:

1. Self-service and Account Management - This team manages all of the features related to business customers’ use of the platform. This will include usage dashboards, our business licence finder, product payments, and access management. This area integrates particularly closely with our Core and Internal Products teams.
2. Onsite Experience - This team manages all aspects of a business customers’ experience of FT.com and our Apps. This includes the screens and features to allow customers to discover the FT, onboard to their company licence, set up an experience personalised to their role, company and industry needs, and set up teams and communities for sharing and engaging on content.
3. Services and Tools - This team builds the tools and integrations to ensure our business customers can get the best out of the FT everyday. These include sharing functions (via collaboration tools and external links), tools to allow better interaction with our content and data (such as highlighting, annotation and tagging), and new products that connect our audience to communities of practice and role-specific content.

What do we look for in our Lead Software Engineers?

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 Professional.

You should actively want to work in a truly empowered, cross-functional product team - and be motivated by building products that help people analyse, understand, and connect around the most important issues affecting the world today.

It would be great if you have the experience below:

• Previous experience developing “gold-standard” web applications
• You have an understanding of modern full stack development (native Javascript, CSS, Node.js, etc.)
• You covered the entire software development life-cycle in previous projects, from architecture to code, testing, continuous deployment, monitoring and maintenance.
• You have experience using the wide range of technologies and patterns required to build modern web products and services: from CDNs, networking, cloud infrastructure and databases through to performance tuning and optimisation
• You are aware and know how to mitigate security threats, and the importance of developing tooling, monitoring, and engineering that enables highly fault tolerant systems in cloud environments.
• Have a curious mind
• You will drive our approach to explore and validate new products and will drive our work to add more value to our enterprise customers.
• You know how to be pragmatic when necessary and take into consideration the input from your peers and users.
• Bring your own point of view
• We firmly believe that diverse perspectives help us create a great product and enhance the team.
• Be a team member
• You enjoy the collaboration with Product Managers, UX designers, Data Analysts and User Researchers to improve and polish our products.
• You will be an active member to shape the culture of our team, promote knowledge sharing with your peers, and mentor other engineers.
• You understand the importance of diversity and equality in a well functioning team

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:

• Node.js
• React (JSX); Sass; Next.js
• Heroku
• Postgres
• AWS: IAM; CloudFormation; S3; DynamoDB
• Fastly
• Github; CircleCI

While 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.

What do we offer in return?

• 25 days of leave, increasing to 30 after two years. We also offer additional flexi-days at 30% pay.
• Pension scheme: the FT will double your contribution up to 18% total
• Free gym membership via GymPass, or subsidised access to Nuffield Health
• Enhanced maternity & paternity packages
• Other schemes include: childcare vouchers, give as you earn, cycle to work, travel loans, healthcare, dental, life assurance
• Full details of our benefits can be found here.

How we work

We offer a strict 35 hour working week to all staff in our London office. Our hybrid setup means staff are expected to come into the office 2 days a week on average. We operate flexibly and thus this 2 day a week figure should be taken as a general ratio of the time you will spend in the office.

Our office is located across the street from St. Paul's Cathedral and is easily accessible from all corners of London. There are the main train terminals such as Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Blackfriars, City Thameslink or Waterloo all situated within walking distance or there are several tube stations within a few mins walk such as Mansion House (District or Circle line), St. Paul's (Central line), Bank (Central or Waterloo & City line) or Barbican (Central, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines).

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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