Software Engineer (Data)

Job Introduction

Would you like to help the BBC transform how it uses data?

The BBC’s world-class online products (iPlayer, News, Sport, Sounds, and more) reach millions of audience members every week. To be able to help us make the right decisions to make our experiences even more valuable for that audience, our teams need to unlock the potential of the vast amounts of data we have.

Working in the Data Platforms and Products department, you will be part of the team that is looking to transform how the BBC collects, stores, manages, and understands its data.

This is a varied and challenging role, where you will be working with decision makers, data scientists and software engineers to scope and build solutions using the latest cloud technologies.

Main Responsibilities

You will be a passionate engineer with a background in either software or data engineering and be keen to enhance your skills in data services and systems. You will be working within one of our Agile development teams to deliver new products, product improvements and enhance our technologies. You will be supported by your team and leaders to deliver value to our audience with an eye on quality, scale, and security. As a data engineer you will be responsible for helping maintain pipelines for ingest, processing and summarisation of data, as well as our improving our experimentation infrastructure.

Are you the right candidate?

You don’t need you to be an expert in all these areas, only some of them. If you have a base understanding of the areas and their underlying principles, you will shine. So don’t feel that you can’t apply if you don’t have all these skills. After all, you’ll work with, and be mentored by, a friendly development team, and the BBC will provide many opportunities for learning as you progress.

• Building and maintaining data pipelines on Apache Airflow or similar
• Familiarity with Data Warehousing technologies (such as Redshift / Big Query / Snowflake)
• Working in Software development teams alongside other engineers
• Pair programming
• Automated testing and Test-Driven Development.
• Python & SQL skills with a couple of years hands on experience
• Code management and deployment (code quality, version control, deployments, CICD, etc.)
• Developing and deploying in the cloud (AWS Code Pipeline, Lambda, S3, SQS)
• Working with a data lake, data warehouse or similar
• Managing your own workloads and working across multiple tasks
• Communicating with decision makers, project managers and end users
• Mentoring more junior data engineers within the team.
• Version control systems such as git

• Deploying / maintaining infrastructure in the cloud (using infrastructure as code e.g. Cloudformation, Terraform)
• Experience of working alongside Data Scientists or in an analytical role

Experience of Javascript or Typescript

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: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Salford - 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.