BBC Jobs – Principal Data Engineer

About the job

Job Introduction

Are you looking for a role that builds on your experience with engineering data systems and brings hands-on experience with machine learning? Are you keen to learn, grow, and develop? Do you want to work in a nurturing culture where you can flourish and be your best? Would you like to work on services that are used by key BBC products and millions of people each day? If so, this opportunity could be for you.

The Content Publishing team’s mission is to build unrivalled fully-accessible tools to enable journalists across the globe to create, curate and describe the world’s best journalism content in over 40 languages. Our team is central to the success of the BBC.

We are in the middle of solving some big questions: How do we put tagging at the heart of a personalised BBC? How can we use data to better understand what we make and how we make it, to build a more personalised and engaging experience for our audience?

We’re figuring out the answers to these questions and more like them, and we’re looking for help. If any of these challenges excite you then come and join us.

Role Responsibility

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer to lead engineering on projects that use data to improve content creation. Our projects include a machine learning system that suggests tags for pieces of content, and a knowledge graph that helps us connect and better understand the articles and programmes that we produce. We aim to build a world-leading suite of tools that use data to streamline the creation of relevant and personalised content.

Our data engineers ensure the efficient running of pipelines that ingest, process and summarise data, and work closely with data scientists to develop machine learning models and put them into production.

You will work in cross-functional teams alongside Product, Editorial, UX, Software Engineers, Data Scientists and other Data Engineers, and will mentor more junior colleagues. We value learning and create a supportive environment for people to follow their interests and develop personally and professionally, through structured training and on-the-job experience.

As Principal, you will help to set the technical direction of the team, developing and representing our best practice. You will be a passionate and experienced engineer with a background in either software or data engineering and be keen to enhance your skills in data services and systems.

We Don’t Expect You To Have Experience In All Of These But Below Gives You Examples Of The Technologies And Practices We Value

• Good communication skills – a great candidate will be able to talk to other developers, to non-developers, and is happy to communicate with people remotely across multiple BBC sites
• The ability to question the way we work, and the tools and processes we use – we’re always aiming to make our team the best it can be
• An enthusiasm for writing clean, well-documented, and testable code
• Curious and embraces change – we’re always learning new technologies and requirements often change, you’ll enjoy this challenge
• Goal oriented – you’ll enjoy finishing the job by developing the final details

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.

We Look For Experience Of

• Leading on technical projects
• Mentoring junior colleagues
• Communicating with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Developing engineering best practice and advocating for it
• Developing software/data pipelines using Python, Scala, JavaScript or Go
• Machine learning, especially putting ML models into production
• Graph databases
• Cloud computing (preferably AWS)
• ETL technologies e.g. Apache Airflow
• Containerisation e.g. Docker / Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as code e.g. CDK
• CI/CD e.g. AWS CodePipeline or Jenkins
• Familiarity with Data Warehousing technologies (such as Redshift/Big Query/Snowflake)
• Software testing practices including unit testing frameworks
• Version control systems such as git

Package Description

Band: D

Contract type: Permanent

Location: Salford

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.

The situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak is developing quickly and the BBC is keen to continue to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people across the BBC, while continuing to protect our services. To reduce the risk access to BBC buildings is limited to those essential to our broadcast output. From Wednesday 18 th March until further notice all assessments and interviews will be conducted remotely. For more information go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/careers/

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/