Job Introduction

What is Children’s and Education?

Children’s and Education is home to some of the BBC’s most loved products and services aimed at empowering learners and informing and entertaining younger audiences. In the department we design, build, manage and maintain a variety of applications which reach millions of people every week. To give you an idea, we’re responsible for:

The Bitesize, Newsround, CBBC and CBeebies websites

A family of Children’s apps, including Playtime Island, Go Explore and Get Creative

An extensive portfolio of games and interactive experiences

We’re at the start of an exciting journey. We’re reimagining our online services, making them more personally relevant and fit for the future. By joining our team you will be given the opportunity to make a real difference in our mission to reinvent the BBC online for a new generation.

Our agile teams are made up of software engineers, testers, user experience designers, design researchers, product owners, business analysts and project managers, all striving to create extraordinary experiences for our audiences.

Learning, developing and sparking curiosity is part of our culture, so you will be joining a team who really care about you, the development of your technical skills, your career aspirations and your contribution to our great team culture.

How we work

At the BBC we build our products following Continuous Delivery practises on AWS with a strong focus on Node.JS and React. Builds run with fully automated pipelines deploying to live multiple times a day.

We build fully responsive web solutions across multiple devices using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and we create the back-end services that drive them. Our services are highly-available and highly scalable so we build following service-oriented architecture and micro-service architectural patterns.

We follow agile development methodologies and practice Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and advocate paired programming.

We excel at collaboration and often we work closely with other teams in the BBC – and external companies - to push our capabilities further.

About this role

We’re looking for a Junior Software Engineer to join our Bitesize team.

Bitesize is the BBC's flagship digital education service, which has been delivering quality curriculum-mapped education online for over 20 years. Our mission is to help all children in the UK to reach their full potential, learning every day in their own way.

Bitesize has a massive impact, regularly reaching over 2 million unique UK visitors each week during term time. Over the past year we rose to the challenge of home schooling during the pandemic with Bitesize Daily, our biggest ever education push - and we're experiencing year-on-year growth.

We work across the full stack, building both front-end web experiences alongside the back-end capabilities that power them. Our front-end stack is based on React, with our back-end services powered predominantly by Node and GraphQL.

Role Responsibility

As a Junior Software Engineer you will be contributing towards the design and implementation of various features across our portfolio of websites, with a focus on Bitesize.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Delivering features using agile development practices.
• Writing unit and integration tests, taking a test-driven approach to code quality.
• Helping to ensure technical quality meets the needs for a fast, reliable, always-on service.
• Working with others to get things done in a proactive and positive way.
• Taking part in pair programming, code reviews and team retrospectives.
• Contributing to technical documentation.
• Working closely with other engineers and operational support teams to ensure our solutions are supportable, scalable and reliable.
• Helping to solve operational issues, working under a DevOps model.
• Contributing to a team culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement.
• Learning new technologies and keeping informed of existing technologies used by the team.

The Ideal Candidate

As a Junior Software Engineer you will be expected to develop software to a high standard with an emphasis on quality.

Ideally you’ll have experience of working in an agile software engineering environment, but this is not essential. Knowledge of design principles and patterns and when to apply them would be a bonus. A focus on web technologies would also be advantageous.

You’ll love learning new technologies and be able to evaluate them and apply these to a variety of projects.

You’ll have a positive attitude and a willingness to learn. You’ll promote your skills, share your knowledge and contribute to the evolution of best practices throughout the department and the BBC.

You would ideally have experience in some, but not necessarily all, of the following areas and technologies:

• Web development - building full stack applications, using modern React, Node and cloud based architectures.
• GraphQL.
• Continuous Integration.
• Test Driven and Behaviour Driven Development - writing unit and integration tests.
• Working in an agile environment - pairing and working within a collaborative team.
• Delivering high quality, robust software applications at scale.
• Building highly-accessible HTML5 web applications.
• Familiarity with tools like Chromatic, BrowserStack and Cypress.

Package Description

Band: C
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Salford or Glasgow

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression â€“ the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities â€“ our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits- We offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.

The situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak is developing quickly and the BBC is keen to continue to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people across the BBC, while continuing to protect our services. To reduce the risk access to BBC buildings is limited to those essential to our broadcast output. From Wednesday 18th March until further notice all assessments and interviews will be conducted remotely. For more information go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/careers/