Financial Times

Building the Platforms Behind Global Journalism

Joining the FT in December 2016, I’ve spent the past nine years at the Financial Times, growing from Engineer through to Principal Engineer & Engineering Manager, working at the intersection of editorial technology, platform engineering, and team leadership.

My work sits behind the scenes of FT.com and Print — powering how journalism is created, published, distributed and experienced by millions of readers worldwide. It spans editorial tooling, content platforms, metadata systems, front-end architecture, content APIs and developer experience, alongside leading large multidisciplinary engineering teams.

What I Work On

• Shaping technical strategy and architectural direction for core editorial platforms — both systems built in-house and third-party platforms integrated into the FT’s publishing stack.

• Leading and developing teams of 30+ engineers, directly managing Engineering Managers and Senior / Staff Engineers — supporting career growth, performance, culture, and technical alignment across multiple squads.

• Driving major platform initiatives across content creation, metadata, publishing workflows and front-end delivery — improving reliability, scalability and speed to market.

• Partnering closely with Product, Editorial and Design leadership, translating newsroom needs into robust technical solutions that support breaking news, investigations and global reporting.

• Vendor leadership and commercial ownership — managing 15+ strategic vendor relationships, negotiating large contracts, overseeing delivery, and running quarterly business reviews to ensure performance, value and reliability.

• Improving developer experience and engineering standards — contributing to documentation, tooling, workflows, and engineering best practice across the organisation.

Leadership at Scale

One of the most meaningful parts of my role now is people leadership at scale:

• I directly manage Engineering Managers and Senior ICs, while influencing and supporting a wider organisation of engineers.

• I focus heavily on career development, progression frameworks, clear expectations, psychological safety and sustainable delivery — not just shipping features.

• I operate across multiple teams and disciplines, aligning delivery without micromanagement.

Why This Work Matters

The systems I help lead enable:

• Journalists to publish safely, quickly and at global scale

• Editors to manage complex content and metadata workflows

• Engineers to operate in a modern, well-governed, developer-friendly environment

It’s engineering with real-world consequence — where reliability, trust, accessibility and speed all matter equally.

AI & Modern Engineering Enablement

More recently, I’ve been thinking about — and deeply involved in — shaping the FT’s approach to responsible AI-assisted engineering:

• Led the post-POC production proposal for AI tooling (including OpenAI Codex) — defining guardrails, governance, security and auditability for safe production use.

• Designed and promoted human-in-the-loop workflows, ensuring accountability, peer review and IP protection remained central.

• Ran enablement workshops for engineering teams, helping people adopt AI safely and productively.

• Presented findings and recommendations to the CTO, directly influencing direction on company-wide AI rollout.

This work focuses on accelerating delivery without compromising trust, security, legal compliance or engineering quality — principles that matter deeply in a global news organisation.

The Arc

My FT journey reflects the full arc of modern engineering careers:

• Shipping front-end and full-stack features

• Scaling platforms

• Leading teams and managers

• Owning strategy

• Managing vendors

• Supporting AI adoption responsibly

• Bridging engineering, product and newsroom priorities

It’s long-term, deeply technical, and deeply human work — and it continues to evolve.