[5] François was a child actress, whose performance as Margaret Dashwood in the Oscar-winning film Sense and Sensibility (1995) earned her critical acclaim.

François was an assistant editor and features writer at Emel magazine (2008–2009) and worked at the Islam Channel in London.

She translated Asma Lamrabet's book, Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading[9] which won the English Pen Award.

Her first documentary on BBC One, A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited (2015), was nominated for the Sandford St Martin Religious Programming Award in 2016.

[12] She was also a programme researcher and presenter at the BBC and a regular guest on its flagship channel's The Big Questions from 2008 to 2011[13] and on Sunday Morning Live also in 2015.

[16] In 2017, François presented The Truth About Muslim Marriage (Channel 4, 2017), which was nominated for Best Investigative Documentary at the Asian Media Awards in 2018.

[24] François was a correspondent for the Huffington Post (2014–2015), where she broke a headline story on an exclusive 36-page document written by alleged al-Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

[29] A former columnist at the New Statesman, François's writing has featured in the British press, including The Guardian, TIME, Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, CNN online and Middle East Eye.

Her articles also appeared in The Huffington Post,[37] New Statesman,[38] Your Middle East,[39] The London Paper, Jadaliyya,[40] the Australian Broadcasting Corporation,[41] The Daily Telegraph,[42] Salon,[43] Index on Censorship,[44] The F-Word,[45] and the magazine Emel.