BBC Careers – Software Engineer

About the job

Job Introduction

Do you want to be part of the team that enables some of the BBC’s most popular digital products? Are you looking for an opportunity to use your skills to help our engineers own and operate the platform services needed to meet the demands of scale and performance? If so, then we might have just the opportunity you’re looking for.

In the Digital Products Group we’re building a unified platform for delivering the BBC’s digital content. WebCore serves over 2 billion requests a month for sites including BBC Home, News and Sport. With more BBC products coming on board every quarter, our challenge is to provide a robust and secure platform that can operate at this increasing scale while also providing the features that enable our full-stack, audience experience teams to deliver innovative and personalised experiences to BBC users.

Learn more about the Web Core mission from our Head of Architecture, Matthew Clark .

You can also read about how we are stretching AWS Lambda in a two-part blog post from our Technical Architect, Johnathan Ishmael (also see part 2 ).

Our Teams

Core Services supports every part of the developer lifecycle – creating, building, deploying, and owning. This gives us a diverse set of problem domains to tackle while also operating the systems that serve millions of requests each week.

Our Platform engineers build and operate the underlying platform and infrastructure. They typically specialise in one or more systems and components, while working across the stack to build domain solutions. Within our platform area, this can mean specialising in our traffic management layers (Belfrage & Mozart), and our data aggregation and Lamdba execution layers (Fabl & Morph). You will be working with some fantastic engineers across these systems to solve fascinating problems of scale, observability, performance, high-availability and security.

Languages and technologies we use

We use a range of AWS technologies including Lambda, Elasticache (Redis), S3, Aurora, EC2s and more. We own systems written in Node, Ruby, Elixir, and many more.

What will you work on?

As a member of one of our Platform teams, you’ll be working on some of the toughest backend problems you’ll encounter at the BBC with the support of colleagues with a wide range of skill sets. You’ll gain insight into the challenges of running a mission-critical platform at scale and get the chance to expand your skills with training and mentoring opportunities.

We want to give you the opportunity to work with fascinating tech and get your hands dirty with interesting systems. We want to support you and grow your skills as an engineer – and this

Responsibilities

Role Responsibility Main responsibilities Technical

• Building well engineered, highly-available solutions to handle huge volumes of traffic.
• Building software that meets the requirements for a fast, reliable & always-on service.
• Seeking to always learn about new technologies or approaches, and championing them to ensure our products and processes are world class.

People:

• Working with others to get things done in a pro-active and positive way.
• Working closely with and understanding needs of the teams building on the WebCore platform, enabling them to deliver high value to the audience.
• Working closely with our operations team to ensure the WebCore platform is well-supported, scalable and reliable.
• Contributing to an environment of engineering excellence and continuous improvement.

Delivery:

• Delivering features using agile development practices.
• Seeking out new tools and methodologies to evolve our development processes.
• Solving operational issues, including working under a DevOps model.
• Assisting with recruiting, mentoring and training new team members.

Inclusion & Diversity

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.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please visit our dedicated site here where you can discover the variety of staff networks we have, read our D&I strategy and reports, and learn about our ambitious Creative Diversity initiative which aims to transform the content the BBC creates.

Are you the right candidate?

Essential

• Demonstrable experience writing and maintaining robust production software
• Demonstrable experience with Elixir or a functional programming language
• Experience in Agile practices
• Experience in Cloud architecture
• Experience in DevOps
• Experience in testing and design patterns
• Competence in developing for operational concerns (monitoring integration, performance testing, security considerations)

Desirable

• Takes responsibility for driving tasks to completion
• Understanding of designing & implementing for non-functional concerns
• Experience of database design and use in software applications
• Software Engineering or Computer Science Degree or equivalent

Package Description

Band: C and 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 – 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.

Mae’r sefyllfa gyda’r coronafeirws yn datblygu’n gyflym, ac mae’r BBC yn awyddus i barhau i sicrhau diogelwch a lles pobl ar draws y BBC, gan barhau i warchod ein gwasanaethau hefyd. I leihau’r risg, dim ond y bobl sy’n hanfodol i’n hallbwn darlledu fydd yn cael mynediad i adeiladau’r BBC. O ddydd Mercher 18 fed Mawrth ymlaen, bydd pob asesiad a chyfweliad yn cael ei gynnal o bell, nes rhoddir gwybod yn wahanol. I gael mwy o wybodaeth, ewch i https://www.bbc.co.uk/careers/

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 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.

Attached documents

• BBC Benefits
• BBC Values