Web Development Software Engineer

at  Financial Times

ABOUT US

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, globally recognised for its authority, integrity and accuracy, with a mission to deliver quality information and services worldwide.
At the FT, curiosity thrives and ambitious thinking is rewarded. Together, we help audiences stay better informed and deepen their understanding of the world around them.
Our Product & Tech teams drive us forward in an ever-evolving digital landscape, delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers daily. Our growth relies on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists.
With a supportive culture, entrepreneurial spirit and opportunities at every turn, there are no limits to where your FT career can take you.
Build a newsworthy career at the FT.

REQUIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Experience in a software development role. (ideally web)
• 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 server side web programming language (PHP, .Net, CFML, RUBY) + capable experience with web development stacks incl. HTML/CSS/Javascript
• Some exposure to or ideally experience with a Javascript framework such as React and NodeJS
• Some exposure to or ideally experience with GraphQL / REST API.
• Relational Databases, Document stores and search technologies like SQL, DynamoDB / SOLR
• Good prioritisation and working effectively within delivery deadlines to coincide with departmental deadlines.
• Application performance tuning and optimisation.
• Designing for fault tolerance
• 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 manage your own work streams, timelines, priorities and communications.
• Excellent communications skills

THE ROLE

This is an exciting opportunity for an engineer to join the FT Specialist group as part of the Product & Technology organisation within FT. A key part of the business, providing significant revenue and contribution to the FT, is a division titled “FT Locations”.
FT Locations (part of FT specialist) provides the world’s most comprehensive offering of products, market intelligence and services related to foreign direct investment, helping companies, investment promotion agencies, economic development organisations and other governmental bodies attract inward investment and helping companies to make informed global investment decisions.
Your role within the FT Locations team will be as a web based / software developer and full stack systems engineer working on a diverse suite of web-based commercial and internal database products.
The work will entail a mix of support of existing solutions and building new solutions in close collaboration with data, research, sales and marketing teams within the division.
The role will include engineering on front-end, back-end and systems design across several different technology groups and products (see technology stack below).

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Working as part of 4-6 person development team on a suite of cloud based database applications
• Managing your own workload in collaboration with the engineering team reporting into the senior architect.
• Building robust, fault tolerant solutions that follow the guidelines and coding best practices.
• Communicating effectively on expected timelines, risks, blockages and optimisation/technical debt opportunities.
• Developing and leveraging reusable components for use across multiple platforms and systems.
• Bringing forth new ideas, technologies, software methodologies and development practices for discussion and consideration by the engineering team. We love self starters looking to constantly innovate.
• Modernisation of legacy applications into Javascript, client frameworks.
• Eradication of technical debt, performance bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities.
• Develop an in-depth understanding of FT Locations’ underlying data, data flow and world leading database products.
• Develop and maintain an understanding of the business domains within FT Locations and FT Specialist. Use that understanding to shape the development of the platforms you support and build.
• Assist stakeholders, business leads in the conception, design and delivery of new features and solutions for the customer applications
• Assist research teams in the technical support and development of several internal staff platforms and data management applications.
• Work within the department’s strategy and guardrails, and contribute to their ongoing refinement.