Job Introduction

BBC Audience Platform is one of the BBC’s biggest and most ambitious online projects. We aim to personalise the online and mobile device experience and engage more effectively with our audience. We are responsible for providing account and recommendations services for our audience members, notification and participation services (including comments and voting platforms) and big-data warehousing, analytics and insights services. You will be part of a team transforming the BBC into a data-driven organisation supporting delivery of the BBC’s services such as iPlayer, News, Sport, Children, Weather, Radio and TV to millions of people.

Role Responsibility

As a Senior Systems Engineer, you will be accountable to take a lead on the design and implementation of our system and infrastructure at a vast scale, collaborating with the wider engineering community to create industry-leading products and crafting well-architected and consistent systems. You’ll be building new features and looking after the mission-critical Single-Sign-On platform for all the BBC public services. To succeed, we need to deliver elegant user experiences, as well as a service that’s performant and reliable at scale to millions of users, in a secure manner. You will also be a mentor within our engineering community, so being able to inspire and get the most out of software engineers is desirable too. 

 The Account team is a dynamic Agile team that strives to embody the principles of DevOps - every team member is fully empowered to improve, release and operate our services.

As a Senior Systems Engineer, some of the things you’ll be responsible for are:

• Providing operational support and incident response/management for the Account team’s systems and infrastructure, including out-of-hours on-call support.
• Enabling software engineers to deliver new releases of software safely and quickly by continually improving our team’s development/deployment tools and processes.
• Delivering infrastructure-focused projects which further the Account platform’s reliability, scalability, efficiency and performance.
• Ensuring that the Account platform can scale seamlessly and securely to provide services under a range of traffic conditions and working alongside other team members to performance test our systems.
• Engaging with other teams in the BBC to assist with their integration with our systems.
• Working with members of the BBC’s technical leadership team to help define and implement best practices when developing and deploying software.
• Helping to ensure that our monitoring, alerting and logging solutions are as good as they can be.

 The software that we own and operate is written in Java and JavaScript (NodeJS). To help provide our access and identity services, we make use of several ForgeRock products such as ForgeRock Access Management, ForgeRock Identity Management and ForgeRock Directory Services (OpenDJ/LDAP). Our services are entirely cloud-native - we own and operate our own Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts and make use of a wide range of AWS services such as AWS EC2, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS and Amazon Kinesis. We build and deploy software using Jenkins pipelines and tooling written in Python and shell. We don't need you to be an expert on any of these, but any experience using these products would be great.

The Ideal Candidate

We’re keen to speak with people who have experience designing, developing and supporting large, complex systems at scale with modern tools clearly and coherently. We’d be keen to see the experience of cloud infrastructure and automation techniques.

 Experience in working on different projects and professional software development processes including Agile, continuous integration/delivery and acceptance test for new components. As well as supporting software in a production enterprise environment.

 Finally, we value experience communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues at all levels in an organisation.

Package Description

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Glasgow, Scotland, Cardiff, Salford or Flexible

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 behaviors 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, sexuality, social background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

 Closing Date01 October, 2022