Location
London, with a hybrid working model requiring onsite presence approximately 50% of the time, subject to role requirements and regular review.

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive salary with a bonus incentive scheme

About the Role
The Financial Times 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 to utilize monitoring solutions effectively, supporting teams across the FT, and ensuring high engineering and quality standards including synthetic testing and application monitoring.

Principal Engineers provide technical direction and support to one or two feature teams, leading delivery of quality tooling and products that reduce developer toil across the organisation. They work closely with people managers, engage with multiple disciplines such as delivery and product management, and help foster an inclusive, respectful, multidisciplinary, and open culture. The role includes continuous improvement of technology, processes, and culture, ownership of problems through to resolution, vendor relationship management, and active collaboration across teams within and outside Infrastructure & Operations.

The Infrastructure & Operations group supports fast, reliable, and cost-effective technology enabling FT colleagues to perform at their best. The culture is devops-oriented with empowered teams taking full responsibility for their systems.

About the Teams
The Edge Delivery & Observability team focuses on cloud edge capabilities and observability infrastructure. The API Gateway team, based in Bulgaria, works on the API Gateway stack built on Tyk. Both teams are part of the Infrastructure & Operations group.

Benefits
- Competitive bonus incentive scheme
- Extensive learning and development opportunities including 10% time, tech talks, internal and external conferences and training
- 25 days annual leave, increasing to 30 days after 2 years' service
- Generous parental leave
- Very competitive pension plan with company matching contributions
- Hybrid working model supporting flexibility while maintaining collaboration and team cohesion

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
The FT is committed to creating a supportive and inclusive workplace where employees can be themselves and have flexibility to meet personal needs. We are dedicated to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from all members of the community we serve.

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, preferably AWS
- Knowledge of CDN technologies like Cloudflare and DNS services such as Route53 is advantageous
- Programming experience in Python and Go is a plus

About You
- Collaborative and effective communicator able to break down tasks and provide constructive feedback
- Customer-focused with enthusiasm for operability, monitoring, and cloud infrastructure
- Able to model and reinforce an inclusive, respectful, and multidisciplinary culture
- Proactive in continuous improvement of technology, processes, and culture
- Skilled at managing vendor relationships and cross-team collaboration
- Deep understanding of business needs and ability to communicate clearly with peers, reports, and senior management

Qualifications
No specific formal qualifications are required; however, relevant experience and a strong technical background are essential.