Location
London; Sofia

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
The Financial Times is a globally recognised news organisation known for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Our Product & Tech teams deliver cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers daily, driving growth through a diverse and dynamic group of specialists. We foster a supportive culture with an entrepreneurial spirit and offer limitless career opportunities.

As Principal Engineer - Integration Services, you will establish and lead the Integration Services capability within Internal Products, owning the technical direction, engineering capability, people leadership, delivery, and operational performance of shared integration and engineering services. You will define reusable integration capabilities and establish common approaches that reduce duplication and enable safe, reliable system connectivity.

You will provide senior technical leadership across major transformation programmes, including the Commercial Technology Programme, ensuring integration decisions contribute to a coherent and sustainable technology estate. Building and developing a high-performing team, you will establish the engineering capability, operating model, and ways of working required for a successful shared service organisation.

Your responsibilities include defining integration strategy and technical direction, building reusable services, promoting engineering quality and automation, supporting strategic programmes, leading people and engineering teams, managing delivery and planning, ensuring operational excellence, fostering cross-domain collaboration, and managing vendor and technology partnerships.

This role requires balancing centralisation and domain autonomy pragmatically, influencing teams without relying solely on formal authority, and embedding shared capabilities that provide genuine value to the organisation.

Experience
- Significant experience in a Principal Engineer, senior engineering leadership or comparable technical leadership role.
- Strong experience designing, building and operating enterprise integration capabilities at scale.
- Deep understanding of integration architecture, APIs, event-driven systems, messaging, data flows and distributed systems.
- Experience establishing reusable engineering services or shared platform capabilities across multiple teams.
- Experience defining technical standards, engineering patterns or platform strategies across organisational boundaries.
- Experience leading significant transformation programmes involving multiple platforms, teams and integrations.
- Strong understanding of cloud technologies and modern engineering practices, preferably AWS.
- Experience with enterprise SaaS ecosystems and integrating them with internally developed applications.
- Experience with quality engineering, test automation, CI/CD and engineering productivity practices is advantageous.
- Experience leading and developing senior engineers and technical specialists.
- Experience establishing new teams, capabilities or operating models is highly advantageous.
- Strong experience influencing teams and senior stakeholders without relying solely on formal authority.
- Experience identifying and addressing duplicated capabilities, technical debt and fragmented ownership across complex technology estates.
- Strong understanding of reliability, observability, security and operational excellence.
- Experience working with vendors and implementation partners while maintaining clear internal technical ownership.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience balancing strategic technical direction with practical delivery realities.

About you
- Strong technical judgement and confidence to make decisions across organisational boundaries.
- A strong sense of ownership and accountability.
- Pragmatism in balancing standardisation, reuse and the needs of individual engineering teams.
- Ability to influence without relying solely on hierarchy.
- A collaborative approach to building shared capabilities that teams want to use.
- Curiosity and willingness to understand problems across the wider technology estate rather than optimising a single domain.
- Strong coaching and mentoring skills, particularly when developing senior engineers.
- An instinct for reducing unnecessary complexity and duplication.
- Confidence challenging established approaches constructively.
- Calm and clear decision-making during complex delivery and operational situations.
- Appreciation for reusable, sustainable and well-engineered technology capabilities.

Qualifications
No specific formal qualifications are stated; however, extensive experience and leadership in engineering and integration services are essential.