Apache Flink Engineer

Apache Flink Engineer (Contract)
Financial Times Product & Technology

Location: London UK

Contract role

The Financial Times is one of the world s leading business news organisations. We are hiring an experienced Apache Flink Engineer (contract) to build and help operationalise the stream-processing components of a near real-time personalisation and recommender capability on AWS.
Role overview
You will bring deep hands-on expertise in production Flink on AWS working closely with a senior FT engineer and AWS stakeholders. A key part of the role is knowledge transfer through pairing reviews and clear documentation so the capability can be supported and extended by FT.
Responsibilities
Design and implement stateful stream-processing jobs in Apache Flink (primarily Java) to process user interaction events and produce near real-time outputs for downstream services.
Integrate Flink with Kafka/AWS MSK S3 and the chosen online store (MongoDB/MongoDB Atlas).
Own streaming non-functional requirements: correctness fault tolerance checkpointing/recovery backpressure handling and performance tuning.
Define and implement production readiness: observability (metrics/logs/tracing) alerting dashboards and runbooks.
Support CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practices to deploy and operate Flink workloads safely in AWS.
Enable the team via knowledge transfer (pairing design/code reviews documentation and handover).
Skills and experience
Essential
Strong experience building and operating production Apache Flink applications (event-time concepts windows/watermarks state checkpointing and fault tolerance).
Hands-on AWS experience operating streaming/data workloads (IAM networking/VPC basics deployment observability and incident troubleshooting).
Experience integrating Flink with Kafka (including AWS MSK) and cloud services/storage (e.g. S3).
Highly proficient in Java and Python (production experience required).
Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean maintainable code; pragmatic testing; effective code review.
Comfort mentoring/pairing with engineers to up-skill the team.
Desirable
Experience with Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink and/or running Flink on EKS/ECS.
Experience with MongoDB or MongoDB Atlas for low-latency online-serving use cases.
Infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation) and modern observability tooling (CloudWatch Grafana OpenTelemetry Splunk).
Indicative technology stack
Java Python
Apache Flink; Kafka / AWS MSK
AWS: IAM VPC S3 CloudWatch; plus a Flink runtime (managed service and/or EKS/ECS depending on solution)
MongoDB / MongoDB Atlas (online store)
CircleCI and IaC: GitHub; CloudFormation
The Financial Times is committed to equality of opportunity. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and aim to build diverse teams at all levels.