Senior Technical Architect (Content Discovery)

Job Introduction

• Are you a technical architect (or have the experience to become one)?
• Do you have an interest in creating world-class systems that have huge global reach?
• Do you want to develop ground breaking ideas, work with cutting-edge technology, and help the BBC make incredible online experiences?
• Do you want to work with a range of multi-disciplinary experts, including amazing development teams who focus on best-practice engineering?

This role is a Senior Technical Architect in the BBC’s Product Group. You’ll work on a range of BBC’s online products. Initially, you will focus on Content Discovery - which is how the BBC’s global audience finds content best for them. This will involve working with ML-powered recommendations engines, search engines, advertising solutions (MarTech), websites, mobile apps, and much more.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about both new technology opportunities, and new ways in which we can create services that entertain, educate and inform. It’s an opportunity to make a difference, through being inventive and creative, and working with amazing teams.

In this role, you’ll work with several product and development teams, and also with the BBC’s architecture teams. As such you’ll be influencing both the products you are directly responsible for, and the wider BBC Online. You’ll need to think big-picture on the opportunities, whilst also getting into the technical details of creating products on AWS and other platforms.

The tech challenges in this role are tricky. You’ll design and support the creation of many different solutions, in areas such as machine learning, data engineering, and scaled cloud computing. You’ll need to be across many projects and technologies, ensuring that they come together to make the best solution. It’s a role that will challenge you regularly, but colleagues and experts will support you at every step. And there’s great opportunity to learn and grow, whilst keeping a good work-life balance.

Technology

Here are some of the technologies we use. If you apply for this role, we don’t expect you to know all of these, as there will be opportunities to learn as you go.

• Most of our products & services are hosted on AWS. We use serverless technologies (such as Lambda) and a range of caching solutions (such as Redis and CDNs) in order to scale to very high traffic levels.
• There’s a significant amount of data systems and technologies such as DynamoDB, S3, Solr, ElasticSearch, MySQL, and many other services including API Gateway, Cloudfront, Kinesis, EventBridge and Athena. Languages used include Java and Node.JS.
• Our data science and machine learning involves Python, Numpy, Scipy, and SageMaker (amongst many other things!)
• Our web tech stacks are predominantly based on Node.js, with a JavaScript/React.js web frontend. Our mobile apps mostly make use of the latest native solutions (e.g. Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android).

The day-to-day

Culture: In this role, you’ll work both with the architecture team and with the relevant product/engineering teams. Every day you’ll collaborate with a wide range of high-calibre professionals, of all disciplines. We have an open and respectful culture where everyone’s opinions are valued.

Location: We come into the office one day a week, for collaboration. We have offices in London, Manchester (Salford) and Glasgow. The rest of the time, you’ll be able to choose whether to work at home or office - wherever you work best. Our offices are great places to work - modern, bright, and well-equipped.

Tech: You'll get a Mac laptop, access to great collaboration software (such as Slack and Zoom), and, of course, a range of other tools and software to help you do your job effectively.

Growth: This is a flexible role, allowing you to shape it based on how you’d like to grow your skills and career. There are always plenty of opportunities to learn, take on new opportunities, attend conferences, and so much more.

Main Responsibilities

• Be a technology leader, in both in the BBC’s architecture team, and in the Content Discovery product/engineering team.
• Develop the technology vision and strategy for your area, maintaining an awareness of the underlying business and technical strategic drivers and challenges faced by the BBC.
• Develop plans, designs and solutions that take a vision from idea to reality.
• Understand the technology landscape within the area that you support. Identify gaps, challenges and opportunities, and then use them to develop appropriate solutions. This will involve working with both internal teams and external suppliers.
• Work closely with colleagues and stakeholders from across multiple teams (including product, delivery, editorial, UX, engineering and architecture). Through collaboration, ensure everyone understands the requirements, strategy, and approach to deliver the best technology solution.
• Participate in the incubation of emerging technologies, architectures and approaches in order to understand the opportunities of creating new services, or using new technologies.
• Be able to represent the team in planning and governance meetings within your area(s) of work.

Are you the right candidate?

If you’re the ideal candidate, you’ll have experience being a software architect, either officially in a role, or as part of an engineering or similar role.

You’ll also have experience in some (though definitely not all) of the following technologies:

• Cloud technologies, such as AWS.
• Machine learning, artificial intelligence and/or big data technologies
• Personalisation technologies (such as segmentation or recommendation engines)
• MarTech technologies (including campaign management, predictive analytics, etc.)
• Rich data services (including data stores, event-driven architectures, and high-traffic APIs)
• Websites at scale, and/or mobile apps, and/or powerful backends (APIs, etc.)
• The fundamentals of Internet networking, databases, API design, microservices, security, and other standard technologies in a modern online SOA.

You’ll also be:

• Great at working across multiple teams and products, and with many stakeholders. This role doesn’t involve line management, but will involve helping more junior members of the team, as a technical expert.
• Confident working in a multi-discipline senior leadership team, along side product, delivery, UX and engineering managers.
• Experienced at working with in-house development teams who follow an agile development practice. Ideally you’ll also have experience working with third-party suppliers, too.
• A strong communicator. This role involves a lot of collaboration with both technical and non-technical teams. You’ll need to work closely with others on ideas and solutions, and on resolving technical challenges.
• And overall, you’ll be passionate about working as a team on new technologies and opportunities, especially with regard to experiences for younger audiences.

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

I-FG1

Package Description

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent - full time
Location: London, Salford, or 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.