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

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
The Financial Times (FT) is seeking a Principal Engineer (Individual Contributor) to lead the Edge Delivery & Observability (EDO) work within the Infrastructure & Operations Group. The EDO team manages cloud edge capabilities such as CDNs and DNS, along with the monitoring and observability infrastructure including tools like Graphite, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, and Cloudflare. This role involves providing self-service APIs and tools for other delivery teams, supporting them in utilising core SaaS infrastructure products effectively, and ensuring high engineering standards including robustness, 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 FT. They work closely with people managers, engage with cross-disciplinary teams, and help foster an inclusive, respectful, multidisciplinary, and open culture. Responsibilities include improving technology, processes and culture, managing vendor relationships, understanding the FT business deeply, and contributing to company-wide processes and frameworks.

The FT promotes a DevOps culture of empowered teams who take full responsibility for their systems, supporting fast, reliable, and cost-effective technology to enable colleagues to do their best work.

About the Teams
The Edge Delivery & Observability team focuses on cloud edge capabilities and monitoring infrastructure. The API Gateway team, based in Bulgaria, works on the API Gateway stack built on Tyk, an open source API Gateway. Both teams are part of the Infrastructure & Operations Group, which aims to keep the business running smoothly by supporting change and aiming for high performance.

Technology Stack
Cloud platform: AWS
Observability and monitoring tools: Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus
CDN: Cloudflare
DNS: Route53
Programming languages: Python and Go

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 the 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 and cloud infrastructure is highly desirable

About You
- Collaborative and effective communicator, able to break down tasks and provide constructive feedback
- Customer focused with enthusiasm for operability and monitoring of systems
- Able to model and reinforce an inclusive, respectful, multidisciplinary, and open culture
- Proactive in improving technology, processes, and culture, taking ownership of problems and driving solutions to completion
- Skilled at managing vendor relationships and collaborating across teams and disciplines

Qualifications
There are no specific formal qualifications required; however, a strong technical background and leadership experience are essential.