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, bbc.co.uk and now BBC Sounds, we entertain, educate and inform people in their millions every day.

Behind the scenes, however, we have work to do. 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 is going to require a fundamental reshaping of the BBC’s culture and how we work. For the Digital Publishing Team that means a ground-up rethink of the tools, workflows and technologies involved in creating, describing and curating all of our content -- journalism, audio, video and digital alike.

This means asking ourselves some big questions: What does online journalism look like as we leave the print world behind? 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 best 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 thinking about technology and culture too. Questions like: Instead of large unwieldy production tools can we build smarter and faster web-based apps out of React components and power them with GraphQL? How can we bring 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 starting right now. Come join us.

Role Responsibility

BBC Design & Engineering is looking for an experienced, professional and enthusiastic software engineer. As a full-stack developer on the Digital Publishing team your responsibilities will be: 

Lead the design and development of effective software that meets complex product and business needs

Review and give constructive feedback on others’ code

Drive work to successful completion across the immediate team

Write appropriate tests using automated test-driven techniques for ensuring code quality and coverage

Integrate the software with monitoring and support tools

Ensure the teams software works in its operating environment

Write, review and take responsibility for technical documentation

Lead troubleshooting and resolution of issues throughout the product life cycle, including out of hours support for incident resolution

Participate in and lead as required, the team's agile planning and delivery process

Effectively participate in and help improve the team’s software development methodologies, such as pairing, code and documentation reviewing and continuous delivery 

Work with project, product and technical leads to design software and create implementable specifications and tasks at feature and component level

Mentor and coach more junior staff.  Provide technical leadership and direction to peers and colleagues. 

Learn new technologies and keep abreast of existing technologies and help introduce them where appropriate

The Ideal Candidate

Experience writing and maintaining large scale robust production software in a fast-changing environment with rapid release cycles

Expertise in one or more mainstream development language/frameworks, particularly Javascript, Node and React

Competence in database design and use in software applications

Expertise in web architecture and key technologies (HTTP, DNS, distributed design)

Expertise in test driven development and broader testing and QA concerns

Expertise in developing for operational and non-functional concerns (monitoring integration, performance testing, scale, availability and resilience, security considerations)

Extensive experience of project working and professional software development processes, including agile

Competence in translating product requirements into technical solutions

Demonstrable experience in using design patterns

Effective leadership and collaboration inside and beyond the team. The ability to influence diverse stakeholders effectively

Takes responsibility for driving work to completion across the team

Package Description

Band: D 

Contract type: Permanent- Full Time

Location: London/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 – 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.