Data Manager

Job Introduction

The BBC has been serving audiences online for a quarter of a century. Across key products including BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds, BBC News and BBC Sport, we entertain, educate and inform audiences in their millions every day.

Behind the scenes, we are making the shift from broadcasting to our audiences to a service shaped by them and designed around their wants and needs. We are creating personalised products and 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 that's why it is right at the top of our agenda.

Delivering it requires a fundamental reshaping of the BBC's culture and how we work. The Content Metadata workstream describes and classifies all of our content - journalism, audio, video and digital alike.

This means asking ourselves some big questions: What metadata do we need to deliver a personalised BBC? What does the future of tagging at the BBC look like? What actions can we take to help increase visitor numbers, or enable experimentation?

Main Responsibilities

The Data Manager will help to answer these questions and ask more like them. You will be working and specialising in content metadata development and governance, you will have the following responsibilities:

• Input into strategic priorities for content metadata across the BBC
• Development and governance of content metadata vocabularies and ontologies, including alignment with public standards and schemas
• Development and maintenance of metadata tooling required by Data Managers for effective metadata governance
• Collaboration with other data disciplines in the Product Data team, including Data Science, Governance and Analytics

Are you the right candidate?

• You'll have some experience working with content metadata. You don't necessarily have to speak RDF but you'll have substantial experience with approaches to classification, data modelling, information architecture and content metadata
• You have experience working collaboratively with people from a range of backgrounds and experience, specifically editorial, design and technical teams
• You are comfortable using scripting languages for data manipulation, ideally in the context of cloud-based technologies or at least familiarity with common RDBMS applications
• You'll probably have some experience in identifying creative and original approaches to complex problems across technical and editorial domains

Essential

• Experience working in the data management field
• Experience working with controlled vocabularies or ontologies/taxonomies, ideally applied to the media industry
• Experience of working with data, SQL and structured querying languages
• Knowledge of data modeling and appreciation of different data structures and their benefits and limitations under particular use cases
• Experience of working collectively across a diverse set of stakeholders
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Desirable

• Experience of programming using scripting languages such as Python
• Experience with agile or other rapid application development methods
• Broadcast, production, start-up or media experience
• A mix of public sector and commercial experience
• Experience training/mentoring peers
• Qualification in information management, library studies or equivalent

About the BBC

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.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here

Package Description

Band: C
Contract type: Permanent
Location: London, Salford or Glasgow - Hybrid

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.