“The Bulgarian team is hard-working, knowledgeable and constantly pushing to deliver the best solutions.”

Since 2019, Pwrteams has been a trusted delivery partner to News UK Tech, building and scaling a well-established, dedicated technology team in Bulgaria. News UK is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading media organisations, home to world-recognised news and broadcast brands that reach millions of people every month.

Over the years, Pwrteams has attracted exceptional engineers and specialists who bring deep expertise, strong ownership and a passion for solving complex problems. The team continues to grow, contributing to high-impact projects across News UK’s technology landscape.

To cast a light on some of the exciting initiatives the team is working on, we spoke with Pete Martin, Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at News UK Tech. In this interview, he shares insights into the evolution of News UK’s data platforms, the technologies his team uses and his perspective on what makes the collaboration with the Bulgaria-based team such a strong and successful partnership.

You are the Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at News UK Tech. Can you share how you came into this position and what your previous educational and professional background was?

I began my career working with data as an administrative assistant for a business-to-business media company. That was in 1999. In those days, data arrived on paper forms, and a team of people would manually enter it using green-screen terminals. Our office didn’t even have the internet or email.

As I was the kid in the room who knew how computers worked, I was eventually given the task of exploring how we could use email to contact our subscribers and the web to collect data. I project-managed the building of online subscription and data collection platforms, teaching myself to code along the way. I also taught myself how to extract data from our ancient DBMS and load it into the email marketing systems that were just starting to emerge.

I left that company in 2016, and by that time, I had implemented (several times over) modern stacks for web and mobile applications, in particular, their integration with marketing technology and analytics platforms.

When I first started at News UK, my role was to run the web analytics tools and to help the Analytics and Data Science teams access the data. We had it in BigQuery, but this quickly led to the establishment of our Full-Stack and MLOps teams in Sofia to help us really accelerate the work that we were doing.

I’m now responsible for Engineering and Architecture for all of the Data Teams’ activities, including Data Collection, Data Warehousing and Data Products as well as integration with our Marketing and Advertising stacks.

Tell us more about the main projects the News UK Tech’s Data Architecture and Engineering team is currently working on? Which are the most challenging ones?

There is always a lot going on in Data Architecture and Engineering. Two of the most exciting are probably ARC and NDAP.

• NDAP, which stands for News Data Adapter Protocol, is an initiative to completely change how behavioural data (e.g., analytics) is collected across all of News UK’s websites and mobile applications. As a data-driven business, if we don’t collect data correctly at source, it negatively impacts everything that we do downstream. NDAP will ensure that we have much greater confidence in our data by providing a consistent and testable approach on all platforms.

• ARC is our new application to deliver bespoke data visualisations to our editorial teams, giving them a single place to access the information they need to make informed decisions about what to publish.

What technologies does your team rely on?

In the Data Team, we mainly use GCP, but we make heavy use of AWS for some applications.
At the heart of almost everything we build is Google BigQuery. Тhat is where we store data and prepare it for consumption by building pipelines with Apache Airflow.

To build our front-ends, we mainly use Express and React, running on Google Cloud Run. Alongside this, we use a range of supporting tools such as Cloud Functions, Redis and a design system.

The team has a good degree of autonomy to pick the tools they think are right for the job, as long as we are within the standards defined by the News UK technical leadership.

Regardless of the individual tool choices, the great strength of the team is that they are all extremely proficient at infrastructure-as-code (we use Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines (we use CircleCI). This means our code is always reliable, and getting new iterations into production is fast and well-controlled.

I think this has been key to the success of the Data Team in the last few years and has revolutionised the number of products and services that we have been able to offer.

How do you decide which tools and platforms are best suited for your evolving data architecture needs?

When it comes to deciding what to use, we follow a few key principles:

•  Architectural Decision Records (ADRs). For new projects or substantial changes to existing projects, teams are encouraged to submit an ADR. This is a simple document in Confluence that follows a set template. The team sets out the problem they are trying to solve, provides 2 – 3 possible solutions, one of which is the proposed solution. The pros and cons of each are listed. They can then seek feedback from anyone in the News UK Тech team. It is not an approval process, it is a chance to gather the thoughts, experience and expertise of the wider team.
• Global RFCs are defined at a UK and global level and set high-level standards around what tools and techniques should be used. For example, there will be one that says “All infrastructure must be defined in code” and another that says how secrets should be handled.
• The Tech Radar is a document that keeps track of what tools and technologies are in use across the entire tech team.
  
  Through these processes, individual teams are able to suggest new tools and have them reviewed, adopted and scaled. All that is required is that teams follow this consistent approach to introducing new technologies.

You work closely with the dedicated team in Bulgaria. What are your impressions of collaborating with the colleagues there, and how would you describe the team culture?

I have nothing but good things to say about my Bulgarian colleagues. Their attitude has always been exceptional. They are hard-working and extremely knowledgeable, and they are also adaptable and seem to want to push themselves to deliver the best solutions. They are constantly researching new best practices and teaching themselves what they need to know.

Beyond their technical strengths, the team are great to talk to, and it is always a pleasure to spend time with them.

How would you describe your experience working with Pwrteams?

It has genuinely been an incredibly positive experience, and the team has achieved a lot since we started working together.

In your view, what makes News UK Tech a great place for people to advance their careers?

The News UK Tech team is a really good place to advance people’s careers, because we are very open to new ideas. There is a good balance between ensuring that things are built to a common set of standards while allowing teams the freedom to try new tools and techniques.

There is a friendly, non-elitist culture, and this means that we can all learn from each other.