Job Introduction

BBC Digital Distribution (DD) is an exciting and pivotal area that powers all BBC Online services providing state of the art technology, multi-vendor cloud and distribution services as well as in-house products and tools that deliver the BBC  App / website  you interact with to get the latest news or see the latest Football score or whether it is going  to rain or be sunny in the morning or see a programme on iPlayer to relax after a hard day’s work.

The Monitoring Team ensures your and the rest of UK population’s experience of BBC web products is never compromised and you have a wow experience of BBC online every time. The Monitoring Team is responsible for the development of in-house tools, dashboards, products and 3rd party monitoring solutions enabling end to end monitoring of the entire chain of BBC Online services that is from networks, systems, applications all the way to audio and video streams as well as user experience of these streams whether on cloud or on-premise using state of the art technology, big data (analytics and challenges including capturing data, data storage, data analysis, visualization) as well as potential for Predictive Analytics.

These tools as well as being used by product teams that develop iPlayer, bbc.co.uk, News, Sport, Weather and Broadcast Engineering are used by our 24 * 7 NOC team who monitor BBC’s online products.

The team works in a dynamic fashion with opportunities to innovate during regular hack days and was recently singled out for “Innovator of the Year Award” from a list of 60 well-known industry leaders.

Role Responsibility

As a Principal Engineer, you will be responsible for leading the design and development of high quality, secure, scalable web products. You'll be contributing hands on across while leading technical projects delivered by both internal and 3rd party teams. We are looking for someone who can lead development, build sound architecture and foster best practices while mentoring other engineers to grow.

This dynamic role is, part of an agile delivery team closely working with stakeholders across the BBC, to:

• Drive best software or systems engineering practices within your team(s), define and teach practices such as CI/CD, TDD, cloud architectures, pair/mob programming etc
• Work hands on in a team which could be run stand-ups, support end users, diagnose issues in production, perform code reviews, plan releases, build deployment pipelines, as well as write code.
• Contribute to the vision and long-term strategy in your domain of expertise
• Be a department-level expert in a particular area or go-to person for solving problems in your domain of expertise
• Pair with and mentor other developers to share knowledge and practices
• Understand the landscape of open source systems and contribute to the design and architecture of Monitoring systems
• Have a passion for modern web technologies
• Have working knowledge of performance and large scale Engineering
• Seek out new technologies, tools, and methodologies to keep BBC in the forefront of technology as well as efficient processes

The Ideal Candidate

The role would suit someone who has a strong interest in Engineering with several years experience in either developing user-facing products employing software engineering best practices or passionate about orchestrating platform, automation, repeatability, performance or using their deep expertise in Systems which maybe RHEL 7, Networks, VMs etc. 

We are keen to speak with people who have experience designing, developing and supporting large, complex systems at scale with modern tools both on-prem and in the cloud, can think out of the box and love problem solving.

Several years working experience in some of below will be useful:

• REST / JSON based API services
• Setting up POC, architecting large-scale web-based distributed systems.
• Latest Open source tools and technologies especially TICK stack and/or hashicorp products
• Fluent in at least one modern programming language preferably Python/GO and good experience within a development discipline e.g. testing, pairing, continuous integration methodologies, tooling and techniques
• AND experience in 2 or more of Python/GO, Cloud, RHEL7, DevOps, Monitoring tools, automation OR as below:

1. OR Experience with systems, or networking or application monitoring tool solutions, beneficial to have TICK Stack (Influx / Influx Relay/Kapacitor etc) and Grafana experience or worked on similar large-scale projects with good exposure to scripting languages and automation/configuration management using Puppet, Chef, Ansible, hashicorp products (terraform, vault/consul,Nomad etc)  or equivalent
2. OR Linux [RHEL 7/8] system administration skills which should include but not limited to setting up interfaces, DNS, file systems, proxies, networking, OS, security, Experience with Docker, Kubernetes with good exposure to scripting languages and automation/ configuration management using Puppet, Chef, Ansible or equivalent
3. OR A DevOps person with a combination of Software Engineering, Cloud-based technologies, Quality Assurance and Operations skills/ experience/ interest.

Package Description

Band: D
Contract type: Continuing
Location: London

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/

About the Company

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity. 

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

 Closing Date03 October, 2022