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 a…