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

In the Apps team we build our products following agile development methodologies and practice Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and advocate paired programming, with strong emphasis on automation and CI/CD.

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 are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Apps team.  The CBeebies apps are some of the most popular apps for kids and are consistently in the top 5 of their categories in the app stores.

We are creating a platform which will deliver the entire portfolio as progressive web apps, using modern web technologies. We call this the Universal App Platform (UAP), and you can read more about it in the blog post below:

​What you’ll do:

As a Senior Software Engineer you will contribute towards the design and implementation of features across UAP.  You’ll be responsible for:

• Developing and deploying high quality solutions that will be used by millions of users.
• Delivering features using agile development practices.
• Working with others to get things done in a proactive and positive way.
• Writing unit, integration, end-to-end, and visual regression tests, taking a test-driven approach to code quality.
• Taking part in pair and mob programming, and agile rituals such as team retrospectives and standups.
• Writing, reviewing and maintaining technical documentation.
• Contributing to a team culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement.
• Assisting with mentoring and training new team members.
• Learning new technologies and helping to grow the technical capabilities of the team.

We’d love to talk to you if you:

• Have working experience as a Software Engineer with some of the following technologies: JavaScript, React.js, PWA’s, Hybrid App frameworks (Capacitor, Ionic, Cordova), AWS, Cypress, Build tool automation (Jenkins)
• Have a passion for technology and a constant desire to learn.
• Care about quality and you know what it means to write high quality code.
• Have experience working hands-on as a Software Engineer in an agile environment.
• Have experience in identifying, debugging and resolving complex production issues.

What’s important to us in Children’s & Education:

• We are a diverse team that prioritises collaboration
• We have a track record of developing our staff, and participating in schemes to boost diversity, graduates / apprentices / Step Into Tech are important to us
• We strive for self-organising teams, and empower Software Engineers to take part in all aspects of the product
• We care about quality, with extensive automation, and TDD practices
• Data powered decision making - looking at real user information and using that to choose what to do next
• We work collaboratively within the department and beyond, looking to deliver joined up solutions where we can 
• We value our people, offering 10% development time, a good work life balance and flexible working opportunities

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 – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – 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 Date10 October, 2022