Position Summary
This role will, for the first six months, report into the current London based Technical Director for FT Core. After six months, the role will transition to report into the CTO. As Technical Director of FT Core, you will lead the building of a world-class engineering capability in the Financial Times in partnership with Xoomworks Technology office in Sofia. You will be pivotal in establishing FT journalistic mission, our ways of working and culture in our Sofia office. Critically, this includes an active commitment to and champion of our values and our goal of delivering a truly diverse team (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age). The role will have the responsibility to ensure that the ownership and operation of all existing services within FT Core are transferred to their teams, whilst maintaining high levels of service reliability, data security and productivity against delivery outcomes. The role will have the remit to transform the way FT Core is structured, through talent management, ways of working and technology choices. The role will be ultimately leading a team of up to 80 people.
Main Duties and Responsibilities
In this role you will:
Build, continuously develop and lead a large team of high performing engineers
Embed FT’s journalistic mission and business models into the engineers’ thinking
Embed FT’s culture and diversity goals into the engineering organisation
Support the building of a diverse talent pipeline. This encompasses gender, LGBT, ethnicity and age
Ensure delivery is aligned to the department technology strategy, principles and standards, including challenging and updating them where appropriate
Ensure all deliverables have an agreed service level and are operationally supported
Set, drive and influence priorities to satisfy your accountabilities and meet business outcomes
Organise your team to deliver the outcomes in the most productive way (who, how, when, where)
Work with PMO and Governance, manage the technical operating costs top to bottom, for the lifetime of the product, service or capability
Work with Product Management to understand and communicate the total cost of ownership and return on investment
Work with Product and Programme Management counterparts to deliver against defined outcomes within a budget cycle and to continuously improve
Ensure teams are aligned with agile and lean working methodologies. Ensure teams are able to transition into feature teams to support cross-party deliverables.
Actively contribute via membership of the Technology Leadership Group, towards the development and evolution of the technology strategy
Be a leader, an active citizen across the whole of technology
Person Specification (Candidate Profile):
Essential:
Good command of written and spoken English
Will have a track record of delivering well-engineered solutions using current technologies
Proven experience building a large engineering team over a sustained period and can demonstrate excellent leadership across technology domains like development, quality, support, architecture and integration
Expertise with stakeholder management with strong commercial awareness
Experience in business process mapping and process engineering - optimising workflows
Experience with cloud computing, including selection of infrastructure, platform and software-as a-service models. And how platform choices can impact costs in the medium-to-long term
Experienced in product development life cycles and working in lean agile methodologies.
An active member of the broader technology community with an understand of current leading trends
Able to work across multiple products simultaneously
Capable of executing a consistent strategy over several years
Can balance tactical and strategic requirements
An ability and willingness to travel to London on a frequent basis
Desirable:
Experience within media and publishing environment
Experience within digital commerce, particularly in the subscription business is preferred
Experience within customer and enterprise identity management
An understanding of how metadata can drive content discovery and promotion of relevant content to readers
Deep understanding of best practice for cyber security and relevant data protection compliance
An understanding of how business intelligence can be employed to make both strategic business decisions and to aid data-driven product innovation
by via developer jobs - Stack Overflow
