Digital & Print Production Engineer

Financial Times; Greater London; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous annual leave

Medical cover

Inclusive parental leave packages

Subsidised gym memberships

Hybrid working model (50% onsite)

Flexible working pattern requests

Job summary

The Financial Times are seeking a Digital & Print Production Engineer to support the FT's end-to-end print publishing operation, ensuring pages, digital editions and services are delivered accurately and on time. You will monitor production systems, coordinate across Editorial, Advertising, Distribution and partners, and drive improvements in workflows and tooling.

You will work in a team focused on reliability, incident response and continuous evolution of our publishing platforms and

Qualifications

• Experience supporting production/operational systems in a fast-paced environment.
• Proven ability to investigate issues, coordinate stakeholders and drive fixes.
• Strong focus on reliability, automation and reducing manual toil.
• Ability to contribute to runbooks, tooling & documentation for production services.

Responsibilities

• Support FT's daily print publishing operation, ensuring deadlines are met.
• Monitor and operate publishing systems, workflows and services throughout production.
• Coordinate activities with Editorial, Advertising, Distribution and external partners.
• Release management for pages, digital editions and publishing outputs.
• Drive continuous improvement in processes, tooling and observability.

Skills

Operationally focused engineer

Production system support

Incident investigation

Stakeholder coordination

Automation & tooling

Observability & monitoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Engineering

Tools

Grafana

Splunk

AWS

Methode

Arkitex

Asura

Job description

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.

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion

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.

About you

You are an operationally focused engineer who enjoys solving complex problems, supporting business-critical services, and ensuring systems run reliably every day. You thrive in deadline-driven environments, remain calm under pressure, and take pride in delivering high-quality operational support.

You have experience supporting production or operational systems, investigating technical issues, coordinating with multiple stakeholders, and driving problems through to resolution. You are proactive, adaptable, and always looking for opportunities to improve processes, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance service reliability.

Whether your background is in publishing, production engineering, technical operations, platform operations or another operational support environment, you enjoy working as part of a collaborative team and are motivated by delivering reliable services that have a direct impact on the business.

About the team

Digital Print Services (DPS) is part of Internal Products at the Financial Times and is responsible for managing and supporting the end-to-end processes, systems and services that enable the daily production and publication of the FT's print products.

The team works closely with Editorial, Advertising, Production, Distribution, Technology and external print partners to ensure content moves successfully from editorial creation through page production to global print publication and digital distribution.

Alongside supporting daily production, we continuously improve our operational processes, monitoring, tooling and workflows to increase reliability, reduce manual effort and enhance the services we provide. We are also exploring opportunities to leverage automation, data and AI-driven capabilities to improve operational efficiency, strengthen service monitoring and enhance the resilience of our print publishing operation.

As a team, we combine technical expertise, operational excellence and strong stakeholder collaboration to operate, support and continuously improve the FT's print publishing process. We are accountable for ensuring the successful delivery of daily print production while driving improvements that enhance reliability, efficiency and resilience.

The nature of print publishing means reliability, operational discipline and effective decision-making under deadline pressure are central to the team's success.

What you'll work on

As a Digital & Print Production Engineer, you'll play a key role in supporting the FT's end-to-end print publishing operation, ensuring newspaper pages, digital editions and associated publishing services are delivered accurately and on time every day.

Working as part of the Digital Print Services team, you'll monitor business-critical production systems, coordinate operational activities across multiple stakeholders, investigate and resolve incidents, and help maintain the reliability of the services that support the FT's global print operation.

You’ll contribute to the continuous improvement of our operational processes by identifying opportunities to enhance workflows, automation, monitoring and documentation, while supporting the evolution of our publishing platforms and operational tooling.

This role is based on standard business hours. However, due to the nature of the FT's print publishing operation, occasional Sunday working and flexibility to provide support outside of normal working hours, particularly during evening production periods or business-critical incidents, will be required.

Your responsibilities will include

Operational Service Delivery

• Supporting the successful delivery of the FT's daily print publishing operation, ensuring production deadlines and business commitments are met.
• Monitoring and operating business-critical publishing systems, workflows and services throughout the production lifecycle.
• Coordinating production activities with Editorial, Advertising, Distribution, Print Sites and external partners.
• Managing the release of newspaper pages, digital editions and associated publishing outputs to global print locations and digital partners.
• Ensuring operational procedures and controls are followed while maintaining high levels of service reliability and quality.
• Monitoring production schedules and supporting the successful completion of daily publishing activities.

Incident Management & Operational Support

• Monitoring production systems and proactively identifying issues before they impact print production.
• Investigating, troubleshooting and resolving incidents across publishing systems, workflows and integrations.
• Coordinating operational responses to production issues and escalating business-critical incidents where appropriate.
• Providing timely communication and operational updates during production-critical activities and service disruptions.
• Supporting post-incident reviews, root cause analysis and preventative improvements.
• Working with internal teams and third-party suppliers to restore services as quickly as possible.

Continuous Improvement & Engineering

• Identifying opportunities to improve operational processes, workflows and service reliability.
• Developing and enhancing operational tooling, automation and monitoring capabilities.
• Improving operational documentation, runbooks and knowledge sharing across the team.
• Analysing operational trends to identify recurring issues and implement preventative improvements.
• Supporting the implementation of new publishing capabilities, workflow enhancements and production services.
• Contributing to improvements in observability, resilience and operational efficiency across the Digital Print Services platform.
• Supporting testing, deployments and operational readiness activities for new services and enhancements.

Collaboration & Service Excellence

• Building strong working relationships with Editorial, Advertising, Production, Distribution and Technology teams.
• Working closely with external print partners and technology suppliers to ensure reliable service delivery.
• Supporting supplier issue resolution and service level management.
• Acting as a central point of contact during production activities where required.
• Providing excellent operational support to internal customers throughout the print publishing lifecycle.

Our technology

The Digital Print Services team works across a combination of publishing platforms, operational tooling, cloud services, integrations and vendor-managed systems.

Publishing & Production

• Editorial publishing systems and print production workflows
• Content management and publishing platforms
• Print planning, page production and editorial workflow tools

Operations & Service Management

• Service management and ticketing systems
• Monitoring, alerting and operational support tooling
• Reporting, analytics and operational dashboards
• Workflow automation and integration platforms
• AWS and cloud-hosted services
• CI/CD pipelines and deployment tooling
• GitHub and version control systems
• AI-assisted tools and automation technologies
• Experience supporting business-critical operational or production services.
• Experience working in deadline-driven operational environments where reliability is essential.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Experience investigating and resolving operational incidents and technical issues.
• Experience working with monitoring, alerting or operational support tooling.
• Experience working with cloud-hosted or distributed systems.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience working collaboratively across multiple technical and business teams.
• Experience working with external suppliers or third-party service providers.
• A methodical approach with excellent attention to detail.
• Comfortable learning new technologies and adapting to changing business needs.
• Flexible and adaptable, with the ability to support business-critical operational activities when required.

Experience with print publishing, newspaper production, editorial workflows or media operations would be highly advantageous.

Experience working with AWS, monitoring platforms (such as Grafana, Splunk or Graphite), publishing systems (including Methode, Arkitex or Asura), Adobe Creative Suite or workflow automation technologies would also be beneficial.

Characteristics we value

• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
• A proactive approach to problem-solving.
• Calmness under pressure.
• Ownership and accountability.
• Curiosity and a commitment to continuous learning.
• Excellent attention to detail.
• Adaptability in fast-paced operational environments.
• A customer-focused mindset.
• A passion for continuous improvement and operational excellence.
• An interest in publishing, journalism or operational technology.

What's in it for you? Our benefits

Our benefits vary by location, but we are committed to providing best-in-class perks across all our offices.

• generous annual leave
• medical cover
• inclusive parental leave packages
• subsidised gym memberships
• opportunities to give back to the community
• We've embraced a 50% hybrid working model (averaging two to three days onsite) that fosters trust and remote adaptability while encouraging in-person camaraderie and peer learning.
• Additionally, we are open to accommodating specific flexible working pattern requests for all roles where feasible.

We are a Disability Confident employer and Valuable 500 signatory.

Further information

At the FT, we embrace innovation and the use of technology and appreciate that individuals may leverage AI tools as part of their job application process. Whilst we are happy for you to use AI to assist with your application, it is essential that all information provided is authentic and accurately represents your skills, experience and qualifications.