Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
Corporate Technology is part of Internal Products and manages the technology solutions that support several of the Financial Times’ key internal business functions, including People, Finance, and Procurement. This area encompasses significant enterprise platforms like Oracle Fusion and Workday, as well as specialized platforms, integrations, data flows, and in-house developed tools. As Principal Engineer – Corporate Technology, you will lead senior engineering efforts across this area. You will define the engineering strategy for the domain and collaborate with Engineering Leads and senior engineers to ensure platforms and services remain secure, resilient, scalable, well managed, and adaptable to business needs.
A key part of the role is to establish and enhance a solid engineering leadership approach across Corporate Technology. You will assign clear ownership and accountability to individual platforms, offer technical direction, mentoring, and oversight to maintain a unified and sustainable technology infrastructure. Partnering with Product, Architecture, Security, Data, and senior stakeholders from People, Finance, and Procurement, you will develop technology strategy and roadmaps, find opportunities to simplify and modernise the estate, and lead engineering for large-scale transformation efforts.

Key Responsibilities
- Define the engineering vision for Corporate Technology covering People, Finance, and Procurement platforms and services, converting FT and Internal Products technology strategy into specific priorities and roadmaps.
- Deliver senior technical direction across enterprise platforms, integrations, data flows, and internally developed capabilities.
- Work with Architecture and Engineering Leads to establish technical standards, patterns and guardrails, ensuring decisions consider security, resilience, scalability, operability, maintainability and cost.
- Recognize systemic technical risks, lifecycle challenges, technical debt, and opportunities to simplify the technology estate.
- Ensure Engineering Leads have clear accountability for engineering, operation and continuous improvement of their platforms.
- Support complex technical decisions spanning multiple platforms while creating autonomy for Engineering Leads.
- Direct and cultivate Engineering Leads and senior engineers, improving technical judgement, platform ownership, succession, and specialist capability.
- Offer senior engineering direction for key technology efforts, ensuring new capabilities are transferred into lasting internal stewardship.
- Support platform selection, implementation and major technology investment decisions, challenging approaches that introduce unnecessary complexity or risk.
- Maintain oversight of operational performance and technology risk, including reliability, observability, incident and change management, disaster recovery and business continuity.
- Ensure platforms meet relevant FT security, data governance, compliance and technology standards.
- Strengthen internal capability and knowledge to reduce reliance on individual specialists, vendors and implementation partners.
- Build strong relationships across People, Finance, Procurement, Product and Technology to help collaborators understand technical trade-offs, risks and investment requirements.
- Collaborate with Architecture, Security, Data, and other engineering leaders on cross-organisational decisions, representing Corporate Technology in relevant FT forums.

Experience
- Extensive senior engineering leadership within a complex technology organisation, managing multiple enterprise platforms or capabilities.
- Solid knowledge of enterprise SaaS ecosystems and engineering methods to integrate, operate, and develop business-critical platforms.
- Experience with enterprise platforms such as Oracle Fusion, Workday, or similar People, Finance, or ERP systems.
- Strong understanding of integration methods, APIs, data flows, and cloud technologies.
- Proven track record leading technology through significant transformation, implementation or modernisation programmes.
- Experience establishing clear technical ownership and sustainable operating models for business-critical platforms.
- Strong grasp of reliability, security, operational risk, and technology lifecycle management.
- Experience working effectively with third-party vendors, implementation partners and managed service providers while maintaining strong internal ownership.
- Skilled in leading and developing Engineering Leads and senior engineers, including coaching and establishing decision rights and accountability.
- Ability to influence senior business and technology stakeholders and translate complex technical considerations into clear, pragmatic decisions.
- Experience formulating technology strategies and roadmaps spanning multiple platforms.
- Strong technical judgement balancing long-term direction with delivery and business priorities.

About you
Strategic and collaborative leader with excellent communication skills. You are motivated to build strong teams, foster technical excellence, and drive sustainable technology solutions that align with business goals. You thrive in complex environments and are comfortable managing multiple stakeholders and priorities.

Qualifications
While no specific formal qualifications are mandated, extensive experience in senior engineering leadership roles within enterprise technology environments is essential. Experience with Oracle Fusion, Workday, and their broader technology ecosystems is highly desirable. Familiarity with Finance, People, Procurement or other enterprise business capabilities is advantageous.