Principal Engineer - Integration Services

About Us

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, globally recognised for its authority, integrity and accuracy, with a mission to deliver quality information and services worldwide.

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About you

You are an experienced Principal Engineer or senior engineering leader with a strong background in enterprise integration, shared engineering services or platform capabilities.

You have experience working across multiple teams and technology domains, with the judgement to distinguish between capabilities that should be centrally owned and standardised and those that should remain within individual engineering teams.

You are comfortable operating at both strategic and technical levels. You can define a direction for shared integration and engineering capabilities while still engaging deeply enough with architecture, engineering practices, reliability and delivery to make credible technical decisions.

You are also an experienced people leader who can build and develop senior engineers and create a high-performing team around a new capability. You are able to influence teams without relying solely on formal authority and can establish common approaches where responsibilities have historically been distributed.

You understand that shared services succeed only when they are useful to the teams that depend on them. You therefore approach platform and integration engineering pragmatically, balancing standardisation and reuse with the needs of individual products and domains.

About the team

Integration Services sits within Internal Products and provides shared engineering capabilities that enable connectivity, automation and engineering quality across the organisation.

The capability spans enterprise integrations, reusable engineering services and quality engineering practices that support multiple products, platforms and teams across Internal Products.

As the FT continues to evolve its enterprise technology landscape and undertake significant transformation, the need for consistent, reusable and reliable integration capabilities is increasing.

Two major programmes are currently running in parallel and both depend heavily on shared integration capabilities across multiple platforms and teams. At present, responsibilities are distributed across different parts of the organisation, creating risks around fragmented ownership, duplicated solutions, inconsistent approaches and limited reuse.

The Principal Engineer – Integration Services will establish and lead this capability, creating clear ownership for shared services while ensuring the team remains closely connected to the engineering teams and domains it supports.

What you’ll work on

As Principal Engineer – Integration Services , you will establish and lead the Integration Services capability across Internal Products.

You will own the technical direction, engineering capability, people leadership, delivery and operational performance of shared integration and engineering services.

A key part of the role will be defining what should become a reusable Internal Products capability and what should remain owned within individual domains. You will establish common integration approaches, reusable services and engineering patterns that reduce duplication and make it easier for teams to connect systems safely and reliably.

You will provide senior technical leadership across major transformation programmes, including the Commercial Technology Programme, ensuring integration decisions made within individual programmes contribute to a coherent and sustainable technology estate.

You will also build and develop the team itself, establishing the engineering capability, operating model and ways of working required for a successful shared service organisation.

Your responsibilities will include

Integration Strategy & Technical Direction

Defining the technical direction for integration services across Internal Products.

Establishing principles, standards and reusable patterns for enterprise integration.

Developing a clear strategy for shared integration capabilities, balancing centralisation, reuse and domain autonomy.

Identifying opportunities to simplify integration architecture, reduce duplication and improve interoperability.

Providing technical leadership on significant integration decisions spanning multiple platforms, teams and domains.

Ensuring integration approaches consider security, resilience, scalability, observability, operability and long-term maintainability.

Working with Architecture and senior engineering leaders to align integration direction with wider FT technology strategy.

Establishing a clear view of the integration landscape, including major interfaces, dependencies, ownership and technical risks.

Shared Services & Platform Engineering

Defining and building reusable integration services and engineering capabilities that solve common problems across Internal Products.

Establishing clear ownership for shared services and ensuring they have sustainable operational and engineering models.

Ensuring shared capabilities provide genuine value to consuming teams rather than becoming additional layers of complexity.

Setting appropriate expectations for reliability, performance, scalability, security and service availability.

Establishing effective lifecycle management for shared platforms and services.

Identifying opportunities for standardisation, consolidation and reuse.

Ensuring teams have clear guidance on when to use shared services and when to build capability within their own domains.

Engineering Quality & Automation

Establishing and evolving quality engineering capabilities that improve the reliability and confidence of software delivery across Internal Products.

Promoting consistent engineering practices around testing, automation, CI/CD and quality assurance where appropriate.

Identifying recurring quality problems across teams and developing reusable approaches to address them.

Working with engineering leaders to improve automated testing, release confidence and software quality.

Encouraging engineering teams to treat quality as part of engineering ownership rather than a separate activity.

Using metrics, operational insight and engineering feedback to identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

Strategic Programmes & Transformation

Providing senior engineering leadership to major transformation programmes, including the Commercial Technology Programme.

Working across programme teams to establish coherent integration strategies across multiple platforms and workstreams.

Challenging programme-specific solutions where they create unnecessary duplication, complexity or long-term dependency.

Ensuring integration decisions made during transformation can be sustainably operated and evolved after programme delivery ends.

Supporting technology and vendor