Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
The Financial Times (FT) is seeking a Principal Engineer (Individual Contributor) to lead our Edge Delivery & Observability (EDO) work. The EDO team manages cloud edge capabilities such as CDNs and DNS, alongside 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, and ensuring high engineering and quality standards across solutions. The Principal Engineer will provide technical direction and support to one or two feature teams, helping deliver quality tooling and products that reduce developer toil across the FT. You will work closely with people managers, engage with cross-disciplinary teams, and help foster an inclusive, respectful, and open culture. Responsibilities include improving technology, processes, and culture, managing vendor relationships, and collaborating across teams within and outside Infrastructure & Operations. The role is part of the Infrastructure & Operations group, which supports fast, reliable, and cost-effective technology to keep the business running smoothly.

About the Teams
The EDO 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, an open source API Gateway. Both teams operate within a devops culture of empowered teams taking full responsibility for their systems.

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 requiring onsite presence approximately 50% of the time, subject to role requirements and review. Flexible working requests are considered where suitable.
The FT is committed to a supportive, inclusive workplace where employees can be themselves and have flexibility to meet personal needs. We 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 advantageous
- Familiarity with cloud platforms, preferably AWS
- Knowledge of CDN technologies like Cloudflare and DNS services such as Route53 is beneficial
- 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 promote 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 multiple teams and disciplines

Qualifications
Formal qualifications are not specified; however, relevant technical experience and leadership skills are essential.