Location
London, United Kingdom (Hybrid model with 50% onsite work, subject to role requirements and regular review)

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive (Details not specified)

About the Role
The Financial Times (FT) is seeking a Principal Engineer (Individual Contributor) to lead the Edge Delivery & Observability (EDO) work. The EDO team manages cloud edge capabilities such as CDNs, DNS, and the monitoring and observability infrastructure, including tools like Graphite, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, and Cloudflare. This role involves providing self-service APIs and tools to enable other delivery teams, supporting teams across the FT to effectively use core SaaS infrastructure products, and ensuring high engineering and quality standards including synthetic testing and application monitoring.

The Principal Engineer will provide technical direction and support to one or two feature teams, leading the delivery of quality tooling and products that reduce developer toil across the FT engineering teams. The role includes close collaboration with people managers, engagement with delivery and product management disciplines, and active contribution to the department’s management.

Key responsibilities include modeling and reinforcing an inclusive, respectful, multidisciplinary culture, continuously improving technology, processes and culture, managing vendor relationships, gaining deep business understanding to communicate effectively with peers and senior management, and collaborating across teams within and outside Infrastructure & Operations.

The FT operates a devops culture of empowered teams who take full responsibility for their systems. The Infrastructure & Operations group’s purpose is to support and deliver fast, reliable, and cost-effective technology to enable FT colleagues to perform at their best.

Experience
Proven experience in technically leading teams and projects. Strong background in building and running reliable, stable, and secure systems. Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus is beneficial. Familiarity with cloud platforms, particularly AWS, and CDN/DNS technologies like Cloudflare and Route53 is advantageous. Experience with Python and Go is a plus.

About you
You are a collaborative problem solver who enjoys working with others to address technical challenges. You communicate effectively, breaking down tasks clearly and giving and receiving constructive feedback. You are customer-focused with enthusiasm for operability, monitoring, and cloud infrastructure. You model and promote an inclusive and respectful culture and take ownership of problems, seeing solutions through to completion.

Qualifications
No specific formal qualifications are required; however, a strong technical background and relevant experience in engineering leadership and cloud infrastructure are essential.