Apache Flink Engineer (Contract)
Financial Times | Product & Technology
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.
Apache Flink Engineer - London, UK employer: American IT Systems
Palantir is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration among high-complexity teams. With a focus on employee growth, we provide opportunities for professional development in cutting-edge technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform, all while contributing to meaningful projects that support UK Government programs in defense. Our London location not only offers a vibrant city life but also a unique chance to work on secure and scalable infrastructure that makes a real impact.
