Data Governance Technical Specialist (DevOps)

Responsibilities

• These responsibilities reflect the current scope of the role and will evolve over time as the FT advances its data governance and platform capabilities.
• Governance Platform Technical Ownership & Reliability
• Act as the technical owner of SageMaker Unified Studio (SMUS) and Data Innovation Workbench (DIW), ensuring high availability, reliability, and security
• Serve as the primary point of contact for platform-related infrastructure issues and escalations
• Ensure that technical metadata, data lineage, and data quality is consistently captured, accurate, and reliable via SMUS
• Ensure consistent governance enforcement across integrated AWS services for all Data handling services (e.g., S3, Redshift, MSK, MWAA) via SMUS.
• Infrastructure & DevOps
• Define and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards using primarily AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and Terraform
• Manage and optimise cloud-native infrastructure to ensure scalability, resilience, and maintainability
• Plan and execute infrastructure changes, upgrades, and platform improvements with minimal service disruption.
• System Integration
• Collaborate with system owning teams to setup and maintain integration between SMUS and other systems such as data stores (Redshift, S3, MongoDB), Streaming platforms (Kafka/MSK) orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, MWAA)
• Ensure lineage metadata is accurately captured and maintained as pipelines evolve
• Design, deploy, and support integrations with additional systems (e.g. analytics tools, streaming platforms, operational databases).
• Performance, Compliance & Cost Monitoring
• Monitor platform usage, performance, and capacity to ensure systems scale effectively with demand
• Track and optimise cloud infrastructure costs, establishing best practices for cost efficiency
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability for platform health.
• Enable audit, monitoring, and compliance reporting for all SMUS platform activities
• Continuous Improvement & Strategy
• Contribute to the development of standards and best practices for governance tooling and infrastructure
• Advise on platform evolution, including AWS service adoption, architectural improvements, and system upgrades
• Support the broader data governance strategy by ensuring platforms enable effective governance at scale.
• Work in close partnership with FT's Data Platform team to ensure governance capabilities are natively embedded into platform services, architectures, and delive

Benefits

Additional Information

Company & Department Context The Financial Times is one of the world's leading business news organisations, recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. The FT has a record paying readership of one million, three-quarters of which are digital subscriptions. It is part of Nikkei Inc., which provides a broad range of information, news and services for the global business community. We have offices in more than 35 cities, including London, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Manila, Sofia, San Francisco and Tokyo. Join us and find an inclusive and fast-paced environment with unique opportunities to support every step of your career. Learn more about the FT, including announcements and career opportunities, at aboutus.ft.com . Role overview This role sits in the Data & AI Governance function and focuses on platform engineering and infrastructure ownership to ensure the reliable and scalable operation, integration, and development of Data & AI Governance platforms across the FT. The role is responsible primarily for designing, integrating, optimising, and maintaining cloud-native platform infrastructure and services enabling metadata management, data lineage, data quality, data access, data retention, data compliance and data sharing in a dynamic, cloud-native data platform. The successful candidate is expected to take technical ownership of the key data governance systems, namely SageMaker Unified Studio (SMUS) and the infrastructure-as-code solution Data Innovation Workbench (DIW), ensuring their reliability, security, scalability, and effective integration within the broader FT data platform. The role contributes to the FT's broader Data & AI Governance strategy by ensuring that governance technology is robust, well-integrated and capable of scaling with increasing demand or in response to evolving industry best practices. The role will report directly into the Data Governance team but requires close collaboration with the FT's DevOps, Data Engineering, BI, Data Science and Cyber Security functions. Context & Drivers for the Role Data & AI Governance capabilities at the FT are increasingly dependent on well-integrated, cloud-native tools. Currently, the technical ownership of these tools is distributed across multiple teams. As adoption grows, and the governance tools ecosystem expands, there is a need for clear technical ownership centralised in the Data Governance team to enforce consistent infrastructure standards and scalable integration patterns.

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