Principal Engineer (Journalism Stream)

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Job description

Guardian Media Group (GMG) is a leading global media organisation, the publisher of the Guardian, which celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2021, the Observer and the Guardian.com, which attracts over 200 million global unique browsers each month. We are renowned for our ground breaking independent journalism and our award-winning digital products.

As part of the growth of the Guardian digital audience and our digital revenues, we are increasing the number of Product & Engineering teams and we have identified the need for the Principal Engineer to join the Journalism team.

About the Role

The Principal Engineer will continue to be hands-on everyday but is interested in driving the technology strategy for the Journalism Stream.

As an individual contributor you will be expected to continue to write code and review code daily, but you will focus your efforts on strategic impact tasks like exploring new technologies and platform changes, consultancy on architecture decisions, and planning technical works.

About You

• You have more than 15 years of software engineering experience in multiple technologies, including frontend, backend systems, web applications and working with AWS. You can comfortably review code written in imperative and functional style and provide guidance about complexity, trade-offs and edge cases independently of the language.
• You have more than 5 years of experience in the journalism & media domain, with expert knowledge in the architecture challenge to build bespoke editorial tools for a newsroom and develop highly accessible and scalable systems on top of public cloud platforms.

What we offer
• Flexible working (see below for details)
• Generous pension scheme; if you contribute 5% then the Guardian will contribute 8-12% (depending on your age)
• Mental and Physical Health insurance and dental scheme
• 26 days annual leave and the option to purchase an extra 5 days
• Up to 18 weeks of parental leave at full pay
• Multi-faith prayer room
• Cycle to work scheme and subsidised gym membership
• Paid volunteering days
• Annual season ticket loan

More about flexible working

We encourage flexible working to better balance the needs of the company and employees as their circumstances change over time, and in order to attract and retain a diverse team. No two situations are identical, so please discuss with us at or before offer stage. In order to help applicants, here are some broad guidelines of the level of flexibility we are able to give for remote working. With the current pandemic situation almost everyone is currently working from home all the time, but this is a temporary situation and we are currently not forecasting to have people remote working all their time in the medium term, once the situation will enable people to commute and work safely from the office.

If you are a full time employee and wish to work at home, expect to be required to work in the office while you get up to speed, and then at least 60% time in the office after that in order to maintain a relationship with the wider team. In the long term it may be possible to go as low as 1 day a week.

We strive for transparency in remuneration. The salary for Principal Engineer at the Guardian is £100k.

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds, different lived experiences and different perspectives. A diverse team means we can better reflect and engage our global audience. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool, and also in including them, fostering a culture where people's voices can be heard and our employees look forward to coming to work.

Application instructions:

To apply please upload your CV. You must already have the right to work in the UK.
Our interview process involves 4 stages: we are currently running the interview process remotely.

About us

We value and respect all differences in all people (seen and unseen) at the Guardian. We aspire to inclusive working experiences and an environment that reflects the audience we serve, where our people have equal access to career development opportunities, their voices are heard and can contribute to our future. The Guardian actively encourages applications from BAME candidates.
At The Guardian, many of our staff work flexibly and we will consider all requests for flexible working arrangements.