BBC Search & Navigation have a remit to help our audience discover the best content, that is the most relevant and meaningful to them, by providing them a breath of BBC content from the whole of BBC Online. 

The Navigation Team are always looking at ways to improve the BBC Navigation experience for the millions of users who access our services each week, either through the our online and app offerings.  The BBC Navigation also provides a delivery mechanism for some of our pan-BBC products, such as GDPR, cookies, geo-location and user analytics. Our aim is to create the best user experience for navigating around the BBC site, using data we can then feedback into our Search system, and other products across BBC Online. All this is done, in order to improve our platform for the audience and to provide our product management and editorial colleagues with the data they need to drive the creation of personalised experiences that audience members will want to come back to.

The Search team maintain and develop our E2E Search platform, using SOLR and AWS, providing APIs for BBC Products to access Search content, in addition to delivering some front end Search experiences direct to users.  We use our experience in SOLR to tune our API responses to the different requirements of our API clients.

The Test Team lead heads a group of dedicated test professionals and takes responsibility for managing, leading, setting direction and co-ordinating test across a group of product teams or a programme of work.

We are currently looking to recruit a number of Team Leads across Engineering and Test to steer the Navigation and Search software engineering and test teams.

Role Responsibility

Our Software Engineering Team Leads are responsible for the Search and Navigation teams,  multi-disciplinary agile teams working with technologies in AWS, providing day-to-day technical oversight and direction, and ensuring that your team’s work meets the technical and operational standards for all of the BBC. 

We value strong ownership of the systems and components we build and encourage iterative and experimental approaches. We believe in empowered teams with a strong sense of purpose.

Responsibilities include:

• Planning features and projects using agile development practices.
• Working with the team to ensure they are slicing work in a way that they are able to deliver at pace.
• Communicating with key stakeholders both within Search and Navigation and across the wider BBC.
• Working closely with our operational teams to ensure our solutions our supportable, scalable and reliable.
• Working with Product Managers, Project Managers, Technical Architects and Test Engineers to help shape and define the work of your team.
• Conducting code reviews with members of the Development and Test teams to ensure the quality of our work meets the high technical standards for BBC Online output.
• Reviewing the work of your colleagues and ensuring that technical documentation is kept up to date.
• Solving operational issues, including working under a DevOps model.
• Assisting with recruiting, mentoring and training new team members.

The Ideal Candidate

We would like you to have some experience in:

• Developing and managing a team of mixed ability Software Engineers.
• Designing, developing and supporting large, complex production systems at scale.
• Development in JavaScript, React, Node, PostgreSQL and microservice architectures.
• Cloud infrastructure.
• Automated testing techniques.
• Project working and professional software development processes including Agile, behaviour driven development and test driven development.
• Supporting software in a production environment.
• Communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues at all levels in an organisation.
• Solid software engineering/web development experience, with the ability to engage with others.

Package Description

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Media City, 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 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.

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 Date17 October, 2022