Job Introduction

We have around 80 people organised into multidisciplinary agile teams of software engineers, testers, designers, business analysts, data analysts, technical architects, product owners and project managers. You will be working in a small team of highly motivated people focussed on delivering excellent features and experiences for our audience.

As a department we have a wide range of projects, systems and services including:

• BBC Sport website
• BBC Sport mobile app
• BBC Live
• APIs and services
• Short form video experiences

BBC Sport website

BBC Sport is at the heart of the BBC’s Online strategy. Our website is the UK’s biggest and best-loved Sport site, drawing together world class journalism and live coverage of big events that bring the nation together. With around 25 million visitors a week the Sport website is key to the output of BBC Sport.

BBC Sport mobile app

With over 10 million downloads and a loyal user base of four million the BBC Sport mobile app is the most highly rated and successful mobile app made by the BBC. Mobile is one of our key platforms, particularly given the opportunity to increase value to the user through personalisation. It has a fast growing signed-in user base.

BBC Live

BBC Live is key to the success of the BBC in the digital space. It provides a consistent user experience across the BBC website for TV and Radio for live sport, news, music and other events. It combines audio and video content including live streams and highlights together with key moments and live text commentary into a single page.

APIs and services

We provide APIs and services that power the BBC Sport website, the BBC Sport mobile app, BBC Live and numerous other components and services across the BBC. Our APIs and services keep the audience informed with up-to-the-minute freshness. We are heavy users of cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and have many existing services to support and new services in the pipeline.

Short form video experiences

We are launching a new video experience that provides opportunities for our users to consume short pieces of video content. These are key, heavily used touch points with our users and great opportunities to serve valuable, personalised content. Our short form video experience is currently being rolled out across different parts of BBC online.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity

The BBC offers an inclusive workplace where fairness, respect, equality, dignity and autonomy are promoted and are part of our everyday goals and behaviour. We select candidates for our positions on the basis of merit and as an equal opportunity employer we value diversity and all of the benefits it brings.

How will I be supported?

The BBC is widely known as an organisation that values its staff, a healthy work-life balance and a positive, growth-oriented workplace. BBC Sport & Live has an excellent reputation as a great place to grow, learn and develop new skills.

We have fantastic people managers with deep technical experience that are committed to helping their colleagues advance their careers. As a wider organisation we work to provide you with the opportunities and experiences you need to succeed.

You can spend 20% time of your time learning new skills, playing with new technology, developing yourself, and engaging in communities of practice as guilds. We understand the need to stay up to date and fresh in a constantly changing technical landscape. We value and recognise the power of teams to deliver change in our products, services and also across our whole engineering capability.

How will I be successful?

• Be a part of improving our great culture by demonstrating positive behaviours and attitudes.
• Be proactive and take opportunities to increase your knowledge and experience.
• Be a great team player and help us achieve great things together.

What is the role?

Software Engineers are responsible for designing and engineering the systems, products and services that power the BBC. The Senior Software Engineer helps to guide the development and delivery of software in their team by exercising their sphere of influence with stakeholders both inside and outside the team.

They are responsible for providing technical guidance and input to all stages of the software life cycle, including breaking down work, maintenance and operational support. They use their experience to ensure that non-functional requirements such as accessibility, operability and performance are considered from the outset. They mentor and coach more junior colleagues and will frequently act as a delegate for their manager and other influential roles.

Role Responsibility

Technical:

• Guiding work to successful completion across their team by contributing work and giving constructive feedback on specifications, tests, configuration and code.
• Ensuring technical quality meets our standards for a fast, reliable, “always on” service.
• Contributing to an environment of engineering excellence and continuous improvement.

People:

• Working with others to get things done in a proactive and positive way. 
• Working with journalists, designers and other less technical stakeholders to get the best outcome for our audience.
• Working closely with our operational support teams to ensure our solutions are supportable, scalable and reliable.
• Mentoring junior members of our team.

Delivery:

• Guiding the delivery of features using sound agile development practices.
• Solving operational issues, including working under a Dev Ops model.
• Recruiting and training new team members to help them grow and refine their skills and behaviours.

The Ideal Candidate

As an organisation we support all our colleagues in gaining new skills and experience. To be successful in this role you may have experience of some, but not necessarily all, of the following:

• Creating, deploying, maintaining and supporting production software for multiple projects.
• Web - current frameworks, and key design considerations such as usability and accessibility.
• App - creating engaging features for native and hybrid mobile apps.
• Services - creating and supporting reliable and scalable cloud based solutions.
• Testing - testing approaches, contract testing and broader testing concerns.
• Operational and non-functional concerns such as observability, performance, scalability, accessibility, availability, resilience, and security.
• Using professional software development processes as part of team-based projects.
• Guiding colleagues in the delivery of features and deputising for more senior roles.
• Mentoring and supporting less experienced colleagues both inside and outside your team.

Tech stack

We use a wide variety of tools and technologies across our teams, and you are not expected to have worked with or have experience of, all of them. To give you an idea though:

• User facing front-end products - we use modern web technologies HTML5, CSS3, React, Typescript, and Node.js, where accessibility is part of the process not an afterthought.
• APIs and back-end services - we use Node.js, as well as data technologies such as Redis, SQL, NoSQL.
• Mobile - we design and maintain both hybrid and native applications using Kotlin and Swift.
• Testing - we use approaches across the pyramid, test driven development, jest and Firebase for example.
• We create and support reliable and scalable cloud based systems on Amazon Web Services, use Git and GitHub for version control, continuous integration and continuous deployment.

Package Description

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Salford (Flexible working options available)

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.

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 Date13 October, 2022