Senior Backend Engineer - Storyfinding Team

About Us

The Financial Times (FT) is one of the world’s leading business news and information organisations. We are recognised globally for our authority, integrity, and accuracy. We provide a broad range of essential services, including news, comment, data, and analysis, to a growing audience of internationally minded business people.

Here at the FT, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. Our 500-people-strong Product & Tech team keeps us ahead of the ever-changing digital landscape by delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers every day. Our plans for growth rely on a diverse, dedicated, and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery, and data specialists – everyone’s welcome in this friendly, forward-thinking team.

Storyfinding team

The Storyfinding team sits at the heart of innovation between the FT’s newsroom and technology. We collaborate closely with the Computational Journalism team to uncover and scale new ways of finding stories hidden in complex or unstructured data.

Our mission is to turn bespoke investigations into reusable tools and data products that empower more journalists to tell stories that otherwise would be untold. This is where engineering meets journalism — you can see the direct impact of your work on the FT’s homepage.

Since the team was formed, Storyfinding has helped uncover more than 10 exclusive stories, including Europe builds for war as arms factories expand at triple speed and Prices for used Teslas drop in US and Britain.

We are a cross-functional team of Software Engineers, Data Engineers, ML Ops Engineers, and Product Managers. We balance strong engineering practices with the fast-moving needs of the newsroom, delivering quickly while keeping our systems reliable, secure, and easy to evolve.

About the Role

Overview

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer 1 to play a key role in designing, building, and operating the backend systems and services that power Storyfinding’s investigative and editorial work.

This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role with a primary focus on backend software engineering. You will be responsible for designing and building robust backend systems and services, while also maintaining that data engineering is a key component of the work. You will contribute to and maintain critical data pipelines and data products, helping to establish patterns and standards that enable the team to scale its impact.

What You’ll Work On

Some example projects include:

• Designing and operating data pipelines that ingest, clean, enrich, and model complex datasets for investigative reporting.
• Building resilient, observable data workflows to support high-traffic and time-critical newsroom events such as elections or major economic announcements.
• Developing shared data infrastructure and tooling that turns one-off investigations into reusable capabilities for the wider newsroom.
• Working with unstructured and semi-structured data sources (documents, filings, scraped content, APIs) to create high-quality, queryable datasets.
• Collaborating with journalists, product managers, and engineers to translate editorial questions into scalable data solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable and resilient backend services, APIs, and infrastructure.
• Ensure high standards of software quality through testing, documentation, observability, and security across all systems.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable data pipelines and datasets in a cloud environment.
• Work across OLTP and OLAP data stores to support both application-driven and analytical use cases.
• Partner closely with journalists and other technical colleagues to shape data solutions that directly support storytelling.
• Lead by example in engineering best practices, including code review, documentation, and pragmatic architectural decision-making.
• Support and mentor more junior engineers through pairing, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Identify areas where AI and new technologies can help in the newsroom and be able to propose ideas.
• Actively participate in the process of requirements gathering and have the desire to have regular catch-ups with editors and journalists if that’s needed.

About You

We’re looking for someone curious, pragmatic, and motivated by impact. You enjoy working with messy real-world data, care deeply about reliability and clarity, and are comfortable operating in an environment where priorities can shift quickly around editorial deadlines.

Essential Skills

• Strong experience as a backend engineer designing and building production-grade distributed systems and APIs in a cloud environment.
• Excellent Python skills for developing backend services, system integration, and data processing.
• Solid experience as a data engineer with a vital skill set in maintaining production data pipelines and using workflow orchestration tools like Apache Airflow.
• Experience working with cloud platforms, particularly AWS.
• Familiarity with modern engineering practices including version control, CI/CD, and automated testing.
• The ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Interest in exploring new technologies and approaches related to AI and Agentic AI.
• An interest in journalism, investigations, or using data to answer real-world questions.
• Data Science (DS) experience or education is highly valuable for this role, as we leverage AI heavily for many of our use cases.

Desirable Skills

• Strong SQL skills and experience designing and working with relational and analytical databases.
• Experience with databases such as BigQuery, Redshift, PostgreSQL, SingleStore, or MongoDB.
• Experience working with unstructured or semi-structured data at scale.
• A solid understanding of data modelling, data architecture, and trade-offs between different storage and processing approaches.
• Comfort contributing to backend software engineering tasks beyond pure data pipelines.
• Exposure to building internal tools or lightweight user-facing applications.
• Experience with building simple user interfaces or/and the desire to do so (e.g., using frameworks like Streamlit).

Characteristics We Value

• Inquisitive and analytical, with strong problem-solving skills.
• Pragmatic and delivery-focused, able to balance technical quality with newsroom deadlines.
• Collaborative and generous with your knowledge.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and evolving requirements.
• A systems-level thinker who can see how individual pipelines and tools fit into a broader platform.
• Motivated by learning and continuous improvement.
• A collaborative team member who thrives in cross-functional environments and values collective success.

Our Technology

We don’t expect you to be an expert in everything. Our current stack includes:

• Languages: Python, SQL
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS
• Data Pipelines & Orchestration: Apache Airflow, AWS ECS
• Databases: BigQuery, Redshift, PostgreSQL, SingleStore, MongoDB
• Version Control & CI/CD: GitHub, CircleCI
• Frontend (small part of the role): Streamlit

This is a unique opportunity to use your technical skills to contribute to data journalism. You’ll be making content for the FT’s readership, using data to make news accessible, understandable, and impactful.

If this sounds like a role that aligns with your expertise and ambitions, we’d love to hear from you!

In Return, We Can Offer You

• Annual bonus scheme
• 25 days paid leave
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program
• Life Insurance
• Enhanced Parental Leave policy
• Food Allowance
• Multisport Card
• Both in house and external training programs
• Your own training dedicated budget (for conferences, courses etc.)

We currently operate a hybrid model which requires staff to work onsite 50% of the time, subject to role requirements & regular review. While flexible working requests will be considered, not all patterns are suitable for all roles. We believe this balanced approach supports flexibility and protects our culture, making collaboration and communication easier, building stronger relationships and team cohesion, and supporting peer learning. We reserve discretion on reasonable notice to change this approach either generally or for specific individuals or teams.

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.

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 [email protected] and a member of our team will be happy to help.

Further information

At the FT, we embrace innovation and the use of technology and appreciate that individuals may leverage AI tools as part of their job application process. Whilst we are happy for you to use AI to assist with your application, it is essential that all information provided is authentic and accurately represents your skills, experience, and qualifications.

Candidates should be aware that the use of AI throughout the application process may be monitored to ensure a fair and transparent hiring process for all.

Please beware of fraudulent job postings and offers claiming to be from the Financial Times. All legitimate opportunities will direct you to apply through the official Financial Times careers site, and the FT will never ask for financial information, payments, or referrals to third parties during the hiring process. If you have any concerns about the legitimacy of a job posting or suspect any scam activity, please contact [email protected].

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