Impress employers and recruiters.
Choose from hundreds of resume examples.

Target Resume Now

About the Role

The Principal Technical Architect will play a key role in establishing and strengthening the architecture capability within Internal Products Technology, ensuring decisions made across individual products and platforms contribute to a coherent, scalable, and sustainable technology ecosystem. This senior role combines organisation-wide architectural leadership with people leadership, directly managing two senior technical leaders.

Responsibilities

Acting as the technical authority on architecture across Internal Products, providing direction across enterprise platforms, applications and strategic programmes.
Defining and evolving architectural principles, technology standards, reference architectures and reusable patterns.
Establishing a clear architectural direction for Internal Products that aligns with the Technology Director’s strategy and the wider FT technology strategy.
Developing target architectures and technology roadmaps that help teams evolve their platforms towards a simpler and more sustainable technology landscape.
Identifying opportunities to consolidate capabilities, promote reuse and reduce unnecessary technology complexity and technical debt.
Ensuring architectural decisions appropriately consider scalability, resilience, security, operability, maintainability and cost.
Identifying emerging architectural risks and working with teams to develop pragmatic approaches to addressing them.
Providing architectural leadership for major transformation initiatives, including the Commercial Technology Programme.
Working with product, engineering and business teams to translate strategic objectives and complex business requirements into technology architectures.
Supporting significant technology and platform decisions, ensuring solutions align with longer-term architectural direction.
Providing architectural oversight across programmes involving multiple platforms, teams, integrations and technology partners.
Helping teams understand architectural trade-offs and make pragmatic decisions that balance immediate delivery needs with longer-term sustainability.
Evaluating technology platforms and strategic suppliers, providing architectural input into technology selection and investment decisions.
Establishing and promoting consistent integration patterns across enterprise SaaS platforms, cloud-native services and internally developed applications.
Defining principles and standards for APIs, events and system interoperability.
Ensuring integration decisions promote appropriate reuse, loose coupling and clear ownership between systems and domains.
Working with teams to identify opportunities to simplify integrations and reduce duplication across the technology estate.
Collaborating with platform, security and engineering teams to ensure solutions meet wider FT technology standards.
Managing and supporting two senior technical leaders, providing coaching, feedback and career development.
Setting clear expectations and creating the autonomy for senior technical leaders to lead effectively within their areas.
Ensuring strong alignment between architectural direction and technical leadership across Internal Products.
Supporting the development of architecture and engineering leadership capability across the organisation.
Mentoring senior engineers and others taking architectural responsibility within their teams.
Creating an environment that encourages constructive technical challenge, collaboration, knowledge sharing and continuous learning.
Helping build a strong architecture community and culture across Internal Products.
Establishing pragmatic architecture governance that provides appropriate oversight while enabling engineering teams to retain autonomy.
Leading architecture reviews for significant technology decisions and solutions.
Partnering closely with Principal Engineers and Engineering Leads to ensure architectural direction can be effectively translated into engineering delivery.
Building effective relationships with Product Managers, business stakeholders and technology leaders to ensure architecture is informed by both technology and business priorities.
Collaborating with architects and engineering colleagues across the wider FT to promote consistency, shared standards and reuse.
Clearly communicating architectural decisions, trade-offs, risks and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Representing Internal Products in relevant architecture and technology forums across the FT.

Requirements

Demonstrable experience in a senior technical, solution or enterprise architecture role within a complex technology organisation.
Experience defining architectural direction across multiple applications, platforms and business domains.
Strong knowledge of modern application architecture, enterprise SaaS platforms, cloud-native technologies and distributed systems.
Strong understanding of enterprise integration, APIs, event-driven architecture and common integration patterns.
Experience establishing architectural principles, standards and governance while enabling teams to retain appropriate autonomy.
Experience translating complex business requirements and strategic objectives into pragmatic technology architectures and roadmaps.
Experience providing architectural leadership for significant transformation programmes involving multiple platforms, teams and stakeholders.
Strong understanding of public cloud environments, preferably AWS.
Experience identifying and managing architectural risk, technical debt and technology lifecycle challenges.
Experience managing, coaching or developing senior technical professionals.
Ability to provide leadership to highly experienced technical colleagues while empowering them to retain ownership and autonomy within their areas.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
A track record of influencing across organisational boundaries and aligning teams around longer-term technical direction.
Ability to balance strategic architectural thinking with the practical realities of technology delivery.
Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, Workday or similar SaaS ecosystems would be advantageous.
Experience modernising complex or legacy enterprise technology estates would be advantageous.
Experience evaluating technology vendors and participating in technology selection or procurement processes would be advantageous.
Strong collaboration and communication skills.
Pragmatism and good judgement when balancing technical, product and business needs.
The ability to think strategically while remaining close to technology and delivery.
A strong sense of ownership and accountability.
Curiosity and a commitment to continuous learning.
An ability to bring people together around complex technical decisions.
Confidence influencing across teams and organisational boundaries.
Strong coaching and mentoring skills, particularly when working with experienced technical leaders.
An ability to navigate ambiguity and provide clarity in complex environments.
A genuine interest in helping others grow through mentoring, coaching and knowledge sharing.
An appreciation for simplicity, sustainability and long-term technical quality.

Skills

Technical Architecture
Enterprise SaaS platforms
Cloud-native technologies
Distributed systems
Enterprise integration
APIs
Event-driven architecture
AWS
Technical debt management
Technology lifecycle management
People management
Coaching
Mentoring
Communication
Influencing
Strategic thinking
Pragmatism
Judgement
Ownership
Accountability
Curiosity
Continuous learning
Collaboration
Navigating ambiguity
Knowledge sharing
Salesforce
Oracle Fusion
Workday

Location

Remote
Hybrid

Work Type

Hybrid
Remote

Experience Level

Principal
Senior

Benefits

Generous annual leave
Medical cover
Inclusive parental leave packages
Subsidised gym memberships
Opportunities to give back to the community

About the Company

The 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.
At the FT, curiosity thrives and ambitious thinking is rewarded. Together, we help audiences stay better informed and deepen their understanding of the world around them.
Our Product & Tech teams drive us forward in an ever-evolving digital landscape, delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers daily. Our growth relies on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists.
With a supportive culture, entrepreneurial spirit and opportunities at every turn, there are no limits to where your FT career can take you.
Build a newsworthy career at the FT.

Equal Opportunity

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.
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 talent@ft.com and a member of our team will be happy to help.