Senior 2 Engineer, Customer Products Ads Team

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.

At the FT, curiosity thrives and ambitious thinking is rewarded. Together, we help audiences stay better informed and deepen their understanding of the world around them.

Our Product & Tech teams drive us forward in an ever-evolving digital landscape, delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers daily. Our growth relies on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists.

With a supportive culture, entrepreneurial spirit and opportunities at every turn, there are no limits to where your FT career can take you.

Build a newsworthy career at the FT.

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion 

We believe in the power of unique perspectives and want all voices in our organisation to be heard, respected and valued. A supportive workplace is one where employees feel they can be themselves and operate to their full potential. We are committed to removing barriers for everyone, with a focus on addressing those faced by underrepresented groups.

Department Context

The Customer Products group works on our award-winning website and our iOS and Android apps. We are a multi-disciplinary, co-located team with around 75 engineers and 100 people total. We value transparency, accountability, shared responsibility, and teamwork. We deploy multiple times a day, and we’re focused on our users and the FT’s mission to provide engaging world-class journalism.

Customer Products sits within FT’s Product & Technology function and brings together people from Product, Delivery, and Technology.

Our Customer Products Ads teams

We have two teams in Customer Products which focus on advertising, along with the related concerns of privacy, consent and compliance.

Ads & Privacy Team

The Ads & Privacy team delivers flexible, configurable, dynamic ads across mobile and web and lets stakeholders make data-driven decisions via APIs and observability tools. We use the platform to build everything from web components to browser extensions. 

We ensure that our users’ experience remains performant and that their privacy and consent is respected.

Ads Growth Team 

The Ads Growth team is a cross-functional group of product managers, designers, user researchers and engineers who collaborate to validate and develop innovative advertising formats for high-end and luxury brands. 

We push technical boundaries to showcase client creatives across video and pictorial formats.

About The Role

The Ads teams work on challenging UI problems using modern tooling like TypeScript, platforms like Astro, browser standards like Web Components, and testing with Vitest and Playwright.

If you know your Constructable Stylesheets from your Proxy constructors, and care about accessibility, performance and user privacy this is a role you’ll relish.

This is a senior-level position that will suit someone:

• Strong in CSS and Sass
• Experienced with browser APIs
• Comfortable with Node.js
• Able to pick the right programming and architectural patterns in JavaScript and TypeScript

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 stack

Here’s a list of things we use a lot in Customer Products. It’s not exhaustive, but gives you a taste of what our stack and tools look like:

• Node.js; Heroku; AWS Lambda, Kinesis; DynamoDB
• Elasticsearch; Neo4j; Redis; GraphQL; Postgres
• TypeScript; Astro; Web Components; Vitest; Playwright
• Fastly; VCL
• Github; CircleCI
• Open Telemetry; 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.

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 data-driven, when it matters
• 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’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 published our Engineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Senior Software Engineer.

 

What’s in it for you? 

Our benefits vary by location, but we are committed to providing best-in-class perks across all our offices. These include generous annual leave, medical cover, inclusive parental leave packages, subsidised gym memberships and opportunities to give back to the community. Full details of our benefits are available here.

We’ve embraced a 50% hybrid working model (averaging two to three days onsite) that fosters trust and remote adaptability while encouraging in-person camaraderie and peer learning. Additionally, we are open to accommodating specific flexible working pattern requests for all roles where feasible.

Accessibility

We are a disability confident employer and Valuable 500 signatory. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments/personalisation as part of the application process or to enable you to attend an interview. If you would like to discuss your requirements or have any questions, email talent@ft.com and a member of our team will be happy to help.

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