Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
The Financial Times (FT) is a globally recognised news organisation known for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Our Product & Tech teams deliver cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers daily, driving growth through a diverse and dynamic group of specialists. We foster a supportive culture with an entrepreneurial spirit and offer limitless career opportunities.

As Principal Architect within Internal Products Technology, you will provide architectural leadership across enterprise platforms and internally developed applications that support critical business capabilities such as Commercial Technology, Finance, People and Digital Print Services. You will define architectural principles, technology standards and reusable patterns to enable consistent, scalable and sustainable technology decisions across multiple products and platforms.

This senior role combines organisation-wide architectural leadership with people management, including direct management of two senior technical leaders. You will lead architecture across Internal Products, driving clarity, best practice and collaboration, while supporting major strategic initiatives such as the Commercial Technology Programme.

Your responsibilities include setting architectural direction aligned with FT’s technology strategy, developing target architectures and roadmaps, simplifying the technology landscape, providing solution architecture for transformation programmes, establishing integration standards, and fostering a strong architecture community and governance framework.

You will work closely with engineering, product and business teams to translate strategic objectives into scalable technology architectures, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term sustainability. This role requires excellent communication, collaboration and influencing skills to build trusted relationships across the organisation and promote shared standards and reuse.

Experience
- Senior technical, solution or enterprise architecture role within a complex technology organisation
- Defining architectural direction across multiple applications, platforms and business domains
- Strong knowledge of modern application architecture, enterprise SaaS platforms, cloud-native technologies and distributed systems
- Expertise in enterprise integration, APIs, event-driven architecture and integration patterns
- Establishing architectural principles, standards and governance while enabling team autonomy
- Translating complex business requirements into pragmatic technology architectures and roadmaps
- Providing architectural leadership for significant transformation programmes
- Strong understanding of public cloud environments, preferably AWS
- Managing architectural risk, technical debt and technology lifecycle challenges
- Experience managing, coaching or developing senior technical professionals
- Influencing across organisational boundaries and aligning teams around technical direction
- Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, Oracle Fusion or Workday is advantageous
- Experience modernising complex or legacy enterprise technology estates is advantageous
- Experience evaluating technology vendors and participating in technology selection or procurement is advantageous

About you
- Excellent communicator and collaborator able to build trusted relationships with engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders and technology partners
- Strong leadership skills with ability to provide clear direction while empowering senior technical leaders
- Pragmatic with good judgement balancing technical, product and business needs
- Strategic thinker who remains close to technology and delivery
- Strong sense of ownership, accountability and curiosity
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and provide clarity in complex environments
- Passionate about simplifying complex technology landscapes and building secure, scalable, sustainable solutions
- Committed to continuous learning and helping others grow through mentoring and coaching
- Collaborative and able to bring people together around complex technical decisions

Qualifications
No specific formal qualifications required; emphasis is on demonstrable experience, technical judgement and leadership capabilities.