Senior Engineer - Customer Products
There is no single type of person whom we employ at the FT; our strength is in our employees, from all different backgrounds, united by a passion for delivering compelling, smart journalism.
Visit our FT Careers site for more information on our esteemed Editorial and Technology Graduate Schemes, Benefits, Learning & Development, and Life at the FT.
About us
The Customer Products group works on our award winning website, iOS and Android apps.
We are a multi-disciplinary, co-located team. We value transparency, accountability, shared responsibility and teamwork. We’re focused on our users and the FT’s mission to provide engaging world-class journalism.
Most Engineers work across the entire stack, although many have expertise with particular technologies and domains, for example client-side, performance, accessibility, building APIs, security and integration. We deploy to production many times a day and have full ownership of releases, the tools we use and site reliability.
What you’ll work on
Develop new features for FT.com and our mobile apps using modern web technologies
Collaborate with Product Owners, Delivery Managers, and UX Designers, contributing ideas to help achieve our company-wide goals
Maintain our high standards for web performance, security and accessibility
Help improve the way we work and the tools we use
Our technology
Here’s a list of things we use a lot. It’s not exhaustive, but gives you a taste of what our stack and tools look like:
Node.js; Heroku; AWS Lambda, Kinesis, and DynamoDB
Elasticsearch; Neo4j; Redis; GraphQL
Handlebars; Sass; Webpack; Preact
Fastly and VCL
Github; CircleCI; Sentry
Graphite; Grafana; Splunk
We don’t expect you to have worked with all of these, it will be a bonus for us if you have worked with some of them.
To find out more you can read about how we route traffic on FT.com and have a look at the code we make public on GitHub. You can also get an insight into how we work from our FT Product & Technology Medium publication.
About you
Your core skill set and expertise is web development and you're enthusiastic about contributing to all parts of the process.
Our ideal candidate will bring a unique point of view to the work that we do. We firmly believe that diverse perspectives help us create a great product and enhance the team.
Characteristics we value
Keen to take action whilst being pragmatic
Attention to detail and common sense
Being collaborative
Enjoy learning and teaching — whether that be pair programming, lightning talks, good documentation, leading workshops or mentoring more junior members of the team
A love of the web, an interest performance and dedication to accessibility
An understanding of design and UX principles
An avoidance of frameworks, to get things done you prefer the tools that are right for the use case and frameworks only where necessary.
Our hiring process
We understand that tech interviews are often stressful for no good reason, so we designed our interview process to be rigorous but friendly. We don’t do whiteboard coding or peer over your shoulder when you’re writing code.
We’re committed to equality and diversity in the tech industry, so we’ll be especially happy to see applications from under-represented backgrounds. We encourage this for example by considering part time roles and flexible working hours as well as tuning the hiring process to promoting diversity.
We have recently published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Software Engineer.
What it’s like to work for us
Customer Products has over thirty engineers working in small cross-functional teams with opportunities to rotate to other teams.
We ensure engineers have the tools they need. People are free to choose the OS and device type that suits them, and we encourage exploration of new tools and techniques. We support informal knowledge sharing alongside more formal training opportunities.
Benefits
We have many great benefits. Some stand out ones are:
Competitive salary and bonus scheme
25 days of leave, increasing to 30 after two years
Pension plan, company doubling your contribution
Other schemes include: flexidays, childcare vouchers, give as you earn, cycle to work, travel loans, healthcare, dental, life assurance, gym membership and local business discounts
Financial Times
