{"id":3603410,"url":"https://alion.io/job/financial-times-senior-software-engineer-ft-core","title":"Senior Software Engineer - FT Core","company":{"id":11348,"name":"Financial Times","domain":"ft.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/financial-times","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.75,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":33,"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Sofia, Bulgaria"],"countries":["BG"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"GDPR","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kanban","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Scrum","optional":false},{"name":"Splunk","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"CircleCI","optional":true},{"name":"Cloudflare","optional":true},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":true},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"Spring Boot","optional":true}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-11-02T09:42:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-02","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T14:11:34Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-11-06T14:11:34Z","days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"About us\nThe 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.\nAt the FT, curiosity thrives and ambitious thinking is rewarded. Here, you’re given the chance to reach millions, create work that matters and deliver impartial journalism in a polarised world.\nIn our warm, collaborative culture, you’ll connect with a diverse community of experts who support your growth, career aspirations and wellbeing.\nYour future at the FT will be filled with opportunities that challenge and inspire you. With no fixed path, you’ll discover new skills and forge a career that can take you anywhere.\nBuild a newsworthy career at the FT.\nOur commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion\nWe believe everyone should have a fair opportunity to contribute, succeed, and reach their full potential. That means ensuring everyone is heard, respected, and valued, while identifying and removing barriers that may get in the way. Our commitment is to be an employer role model, grounded in inclusion and fairness for all.We want every application to receive fair and thoughtful consideration; therefore, all applications are reviewed by a member of our recruitment team, not by AI.\nPosition Summary \nThis is an exciting opportunity for an engineer to join the FT Core group as part of the Product & Technology organisation within FT.\nFT Core brings together key digital assets like:\nContent and Metadata - enabling content publishing, smart metadata annotations, content discoverability and delivery in various forms and formats.\nPrint and Digital Subscriptions - powering a seamless subscription/payments and the whole newspaper distribution customer journeys\nAccess and Identity - enabling several authorization and authentication mechanisms as well as a powerful access decision engine\nData Platform - enabling storing, processing and getting insights from readership data\nYou 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.\nThe Access & Identity team as the name implies is responsible for two sets of capabilities - deciding whether to give access to content in different FT domains and supporting a set of different authorisation and authentication APIs as well as different functionalities regarding our B2B customers, GDPR deletion flows and users' profiles.\nYou will be responsible for delivering innovative technical solutions as you build and operate world class platforms. You will have the autonomy, within defined guard rails, to select the tools and technologies you need to build and operate services.\nWe have recently published ourEngineering Progression framework and associated competencies for a Software Engineer relevant to this position\nThe Tech Stack\nWe often use these, it's not an exhaustive list but gives you a taste of what our technology stack and tools look like:\nJava/Spring Boot\nGo Lang\nKubernetes (EKS)\nAWS\nGraphQL\nCircleCI\nDynamoDB\nKafka\nCloudflare\nPrometheus/Grafana/Splunk \nThe hiring process\nWe understand that tech interviews are often stressful for no good reason, so we designed our interview process to be rigorous but friendly. We have a friendly system design exercise and a set of questions to encourage you to tell us about your strengths and what makes you happy at work.\nWe'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 by considering flexible working hours as well as tuning the hiring process to promote diversity.\nThis role will be right for you if you are happy to:\nWork directly with product managers and senior stakeholders to fully shape solutions from inception to deployment and beyond\nWork within a team of engineers in an agile delivery team\nDesign and implement low maintenance, well monitored, secure and scalable solutions, from cradle to grave\nUnderstand and play an active part in designing the architecture, tooling and release cycle processes used by the engineering teams across Product & Technology\nContribute to company-wide processes, frameworks and guidelines\nDevelop a close relationship with our customers and provide operational support\nThe ideal candidate profile is: \n Essential\nMinimum 5 years of proven project-based experience of building and maintaining distributed systems\nHighly proficient in Java or/and Go (preferable Java)\nHas a track record of delivering well engineered solutions using current technologies and best practices such as SOLID, TDD, CI/CD and pair programming\nBeing able to cover non-functional requirements such as performance, scalability, high availability, monitoring and security\nProof of designing and building RESTful APIs \nAn active member of the broader technology community with an understand of current leading trends\nExperience working as part of an Agile delivery team, using methodologies like Scrum and Kanban\nExperience with Spring\nGood understanding of the principles and trade-offs of a microservices architecture\nGood working experience of at least one cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS\nGood SQL/NoSQL knowledge\nComfortable working in a Linux environment\nComfortable working with code assisting AI tools such as Codex\nBeing able to establish and be promoter of good coding and engineering practices\nBeing able to architect and lead the development of solutions based on functional requirements\nConducting comprehensive and impactful code reviews\nBeing able to mentor other team members\nGood command of written and spoken English\n Desirable\nExperience in an environment where operational support and monitoring of code and systems is part of the culture (DevOps)\nExperience in building life systems with a high traffic/load\nAbility to accurately monitor and analyse system performance using tools like Grafana/Splunk\nAbility to troubleshoot and cope with live incidents\nHolds an industry certification in a key platform, tool or domain used within Engineering at the FT. This could be any relevant certification but currently we are recommending it's an AWS Associate certificate\nWhat’s in it for you? Our benefits\nAnnual bonus scheme\n25 days paid leave\n24/7 Employee Assistance Program\nLife Insurance\nEnhanced Parental Leave policy\nFood Allowance\nMultisport Card\nBoth in house and external training programs\nYour own training dedicated budget (for conferences, courses etc.)\nAccessibility\nWe are a disability confident employer and Valuable 500 signatory.\nPlease 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  and a member of our team will be happy to help.\nFurther information\nAt 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.\nCandidates 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.\nPlease 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 .\nInterested in the FT but don’t see the right role yet? 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