Software Engineer - Metadata Team

Company Info

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading business news organisations, recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. The FT has a record paying readership of one million, three-quarters of which are digital subscriptions. It is part of Nikkei Inc., which provides a broad range of information, news and services for the global business community.

We have offices in more than 35 cities, including London, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Manila, Sofia, San Francisco and Tokyo. Join us and find an inclusive and fast-paced environment with unique opportunities to support every step of your career.

Learn more about the FT, including announcements and career opportunities, at aboutus.ft.com.

Position Summary

This is an exciting opportunity for an engineer to join the FT Core group as part of Product & Technology organisation within FT that brings together key digital assets and services like:

• Content and Metadata - enabling content publishing, smart metadata annotations, content discoverability and delivery in various forms and formats.
• Print and Digital Subscriptions - powering a seamless subscription/payments and the whole newspaper distribution customer journeys
• Access and Identity - enabling several authorization and authentication mechanisms as well as a powerful access decision engine
• Data Platform - enabling storing, processing and getting insights from readership data
• Search & Recommendation - offering search, recommendation and insights apis bridging the gap between content and user data.

You will have the autonomy to select the tools and technologies you need to build and operate services responsible for FT brand critical capabilities. Someone who is comfortable with the ever changing technical landscape and is keen to contribute to the company’s processes and broader know-how would thrive in this role.

The Content and Metadata team is responsible for the digital content publishing pipelines within Financial Times. Once processed the content is annotated both manually and automatically with smart metadata and delivered in various formats to the consumers. The content annotation mechanism is powered by a comprehensive knowledge graph and artificial intelligence. 

We have recently published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Software Engineer relevant to this position.

Tech Stack

We often use these, it's not an exhaustive list but gives you a taste of what our technology stack and tools look like:

• Programming languages: Go
• Various DBs - MongoDB, Neo4j, MySQL, Postgres, AWS RDS
• AWS & Heroku
• ContainerD, AWS EKS, Helm, EKSctl, AWS MSK, GitHub
• Grafana, Splunk, Pingdom
• Jenkins, CircleCI
• RDF store for concept management (Smartlogic Semaphore)

Role Responsibilities

• Work within a team of engineers in an agile delivery team
• Tackle complex technical challenges that you have never faced before.
• Learn new things and adapt quickly to the constantly changing technology landscape.
• Write design documents and architectural diagrams from functional specifications.
• Be a team player with focus on the importance of cross team communication and collaboration.

Candidate Profile

Essential

• Good command of written and spoken English
• Proficiency in Go
• Good understanding of graph databases and experience using Cypher query language
• Experience utilising Machine Learning models for Natural Language Processing
• Experience using AWS
• Good understanding of the principles and trade-offs of a microservices architecture
• Experience working with systems for annotating content 
• Experience in AWS MSK, AWS EKS, AWS OpenSearch
• Experience with Infrastructure as a Code via AWS Cloudformation, Sceptre
• Experience in using third party solutions.
• Experience with Neo4j, MySQL, Postgres, AWS RDS.
• Experience with 24/7  available micro services platforms

Desirable

• Experience with distributed systems
• Experience using ContainerD

The Financial Times Ltd. committed to equality of opportunity. We are determined to create a diverse group at all levels of our Company and we welcome all members of the community we serve to apply for openings with us.