About FT Product & Technology

Here at the Financial Times, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500 -people strong, our 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. And with entrepreneurial spirit, intelligence and opportunity at every turn, there’s no limit to where your FT career will take you.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace

At the FT, we aim for employees across all regions to have a voice so that diverse perspectives are heard and valued. We believe that a supportive workplace is one where employees feel they can be themselves at work and have the flexibility they need to meet their personal needs. We'll continue to remove barriers for all, and in particular barriers facing employees from underrepresented groups

The Role

This is a new Principal Technical Architect role within our Technology department, responsible for defining and steering the evolution of applications, integrations, cloud platforms, and enterprise data across FT Specialist and Community. The role ensures our technology ecosystem evolves as a coherent, scalable, secure, and sustainable way while providing architectural leadership, governance, and technical direction across multiple engineering teams.

The successful post-holder will work across engineering teams responsible for our digital products, application services, and the integrations with the core platforms and enterprise data domains, including customer, company, licence, content, intelligence products, and live events. They will own the evolution of the application and integration architecture across FT Specialist and Community, defining the target state, principles, and technology roadmaps so that we simplify and scale our technology ecosystem in line with our broader Technology Strategy, ensuring consistency, quality, and reuse across the FT. Success will be measured by simplifying our technology landscape, reducing platform duplication and integration complexity, and improving architectural consistency, engineering delivery, cloud efficiency, and cost optimisation.

Reporting directly to the Technology Director for FT Specialist and Community, this position suits someone who is self-directed, an excellent communicator, and experienced in influencing technical strategy at scale. You will work closely with the technical architects and engineering teams throughout FT.

You’ll play a key role in shaping the future of technology across FT Specialist and Community by:

• Defining the architectural direction for multiple product domains.
• Establishing common patterns that accelerate engineering delivery.
• Simplifying our technology ecosystem through shared capabilities.
• Enabling trusted, governed, and observable data flows.
• Preparing our platforms for AI-enabled products and services.
• Influencing technology decisions across engineering, product, and platform teams.

This position does not have direct line management responsibilities. It is a ‘Principal’ role in the sense that you will be leading software and application architecture in an individual contributor capacity — driving consistency, clarity, and best practice across teams.

Prior experience in application and data architecture, data modelling, or cloud platform design is essential. A broader knowledge of software engineering is highly desirable.

Main Responsibilities

Strategy & Vision

• Own the application architecture strategy for FT Specialist and Community, ensuring it aligns with the wider FT Technology Strategy and future business direction, setting standards, patterns, and policies that promote reuse, reliability, and alignment across domains.
• Develop multi-year application architecture roadmaps, identifying opportunities to simplify the technology ecosystem, reduce technical debt, and improve platform capabilities.
• Shape the evolution of the FT Specialist and Community application development and integrations, ensuring that digital products and services are built and delivered through scalable, well-governed cloud-native platforms and services.
• Define architectural patterns for AI-native applications, intelligent automation, APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and agent-based services where appropriate.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural approaches, making strategic recommendations that balance innovation, delivery, operational sustainability, and long-term business value.

Architecture Governance & Standards

• Provide technical leadership for application architecture across the FT Technology ecosystem, ensuring excellence in design, integration, and cloud platform interoperability.
• Establish and lead architecture governance, including design reviews, reference architectures, architectural decision records, and technical standards.
• Define modelling standards, integration patterns, and architectural principles for applications, storage, movement, and consumption in a fully cloud-native environment.
• Ensure architectures meet non-functional requirements, including resilience, performance, observability, security, compliance, and operational excellence.

Architecture Evolution & Modernisation

• Lead the modernisation of legacy applications and integrations, defining pragmatic migration paths towards cloud-native and platform-based architectures.
• Drive platform consolidation and technology rationalisation, reducing duplication through shared services, reusable capabilities, and common integration patterns.
• Ensure seamless integration between domain models and the platforms, enabling consistent, governed, and observable data flows across systems and teams.
• Collaborate with engineering, platform, and product teams to design reusable solutions that support operational, product, and analytical needs and resolve cross-domain technical challenges and trade-offs.

Technical Leadership & Engineering Enablement

• Build trusted relationships across engineering, product, and platform teams, influencing architectural direction through technical leadership, collaboration, and credibility.
• Coach engineering teams and mentor Principal Engineers, fostering architectural thinking, engineering autonomy, and a culture of continuous technical improvement.

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