Job Introduction

The BBC has been serving audiences online for more than 20 years. Across key products including BBC iPlayer, BBC News and BBC Sport, BBC Weather, and BBC Sounds, we entertain, educate and inform people in their millions every day.

Behind the scenes, we are making the shift from being a broadcaster that speaks to audiences to building products that are shaped around people. We are creating personalised services that bring the right content, to the right people, at the right times – a personalised BBC. It will be our greatest leap since iPlayer, and it is right at the top of our agenda. Delivering it requires a fundamental reshaping of the BBC’s culture and how we work.

The Digital Publishing team’s mission is to build unrivalled fully accessible tools to enable journalists across the globe to create, curate and describe the world’s best journalism content in over 40 languages. Our team is central to the success of the BBC.

We are in the middle of solving some big questions: What does online journalism look like in this personalised world? How do we put tagging at the heart of a personalised BBC? The News and Sport front pages are seen by millions of people and are built by our tools: what are the smartest ways of curating the stories on them? What does structured content look like at scale, with a workflow that serves thousands of journalists around the world publishing in more than 40 languages. 

We’re improving our technology and culture too. Asking questions like: Instead of monolith production tools can we build smarter and faster web-based apps out of React components and power them with GraphQL? Can we bring more data science and machine learning to bear on content classification and publication workflows? And what are the ways of working that let one team of software engineers design, build and support this at the scale of the BBC?

We’re figuring out the answers to these questions and more like them, and we’re looking for help. If any of that excites you then please, come join us.

Role Responsibility

As a Principal Software Engineer you will help to architect, design, build and deploy and web-based digital services that are used by BBC staff worldwide.

You’ll be responsible for providing technical leadership and helping the team meet standards for engineering excellence and overall product quality.

Within 1 month:

• You'll be trained in the team's ways of working and given a detailed introduction to the systems and tools that we build.
• You'll meet the rest of the team, learn about our tech stack and partner teams, our history, and where we're going.
• You'll join up with your first 3-month long mission team, doing hands-on coding, pairing with other engineers on a daily basis.
• You’ll positively influence our engineering culture by demonstrating the right behaviours and attitudes.

Within 3 months:

• You’ll form a detailed understanding of the technical challenges of at least one product area within the team. Either authoring, curation, metadata or images.
• You’ll collaborate with product owners, business analysts, UX designers and developers to inform the technical feasibility on new features in that space.
• You’ll mentor and coach other engineers, helping them to grow their experience and careers, and ensuring a high standard of engineering excellence within our products

Within 6 months:

• You’ll have worked on two mission team cycles and will have been instrumental in shipping larger fully tested features to our stakeholders across the BBC.
• You’ll be starting to drive best engineering practices within the team, working to define strategies such as testing strategy, and continuous delivery strategy.
• You’ll provide domain expertise across the teams, taking opportunities to bring objectives together to ensure we efficiently tackle common problems.
• You’ll understand how most of the Digital Publishing systems work and be advocating new technologies and approaches to ensure these products are industry leading.

Within 12 months:

• You’ll have led a 3-month mission team in delivering against OKRs in one of our key product areas.
• You’ll have worked across most, if not all, our product areas and be in the best position to play a key role in the technical direction of Digital Publishing, ensuring our application architecture is fit for the future.
• You’ll be collaborating with other departments across the BBC around shared concerns such as CI/CD, security, accessibility, monitoring, and reliability, to ensure a sustainable inner source culture.

The Ideal Candidate

You may already be a Principal Software Engineer and are looking for a new challenge or to broaden your experience. We can provide a supportive environment for you to explore the technology and systems that power the BBC’s online content, with a focus on building evidence for the next step in your career.

Alternatively, you may be a Senior Software Engineer looking to take that next step. The Digital Publishing team have supported many colleagues in progressing their careers and moving through the engineering job family.

We are a team that likes to work collaboratively, through pairing and mobbing. We like practices such as Kanban, Behaviour-Driven Development, Test-Driven Development and Continuous Deployment but more importantly we like Continuous Improvement - we embrace change.

Most of our work is deployed on AWS. We work predominantly, but not exclusively, with Node.js, React.js, GraphQL, Scala, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka.

You may have experience of, and expertise in, any or all these areas, but if you feel that we could learn from each other, then we’d like to hear from you.

If you are interested to know more about software engineering in the BBC please explore the following links:

• Blogs: https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering
• OpenSource: https://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/
• GitHub: https://github.com/bbc

Package Description

Band: D 
Contract type: Full Time, Permanent 
Location:  London, W12 or Glasgow, Pacific Quay.

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 Ã¢â‚¬â€œ the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities Ã¢â‚¬â€œ 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

 Closing Date30 September, 2022