BBC Jobs – Senior Architect

About the job

Job Introduction

The BBC has a vision to be a modern, digital-led and streamlined organisation that drives the most value from the licence fee and delivers more for audiences. Our engineering enablement teams are a vital part of this strategy, providing capabilities that let our engineering team build efficient, reliable, sustainable services fast, and a community that helps constantly improve those teams practice and results.

The aim of this role is to provide architecture support to those engineering enablement teams, helping them to deliver coherent and sustainable capabilities to our broad estate of engineering teams.

The scope of teams that engineering enablement work with is truly exciting, serving both our BBC Product group and BBC Technology Group. The BBC Product Group delivers audience facing product such as News, Sport, iPlayer, Sounds and Bitesize whilst BBC Technology Group covers a vast array of systems from content creation and capture to media transcoding and distribution. Those areas provide deliver their value by creating a broad range of software, mostly cloud based, targeting systems from desktop apps to broadcast interactions.

This role is a fantastic opportunity to experience the breadth of the BBCs digital offerings, learn and grow architectural skills and help to accelerate the BBC’s engineering capability across the portfolio.

In addition to supporting the mission of the enablement teams you will be a member of the architecture team in iPlayer, Sounds and Partnerships and have an opportunity to learn from and contribute to that team’s mission to bring alignment across our estate.

Role Responsibility

• To build effective relationships and work with engineering teams, product owners and any 3rd party suppliers to ensure the predictable and reliable delivery of our goals aligned with the department’s technical principles and strategy.
• To assist the engineering teams with the definition of project scope and technical approach during project inception and to assist in the definition of implementation
• To assist the wider BBC Product and BBC Technology Groups architecture teams in identifying strategic requirements and advising on cross platform roadmaps and migration plans to achieve strategic goals.
• To provide technical advice and consultancy to our management and project teams on matters of technical architecture and infrastructure developments, including their feasibility.
• To assist with improving the standard of technical delivery and competencies within the engineering teams through coaching and mentoring staff.
• To be responsible for communicating and documenting the technical architecture of our systems.
• To keep abreast of technical developments of strategic importance to BBC engineering and to participate in developing or setting standards as directed.

Are you the right candidate?

• Experience designing, developing and deploying secure and resilient systems.
• Experience working collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams across organisational boundaries, with a focus on delivering work aligned to agreed strategic directio
• Hands-on experience working on systems built on AWS
• Exposure to the workloads of network and systems administrators and awareness of what it takes to build robust infrastructure
• Experience supporting a technical team in conducting system reviews, threat modelling, mentoring and coaching staff
• Experience evaluating existing and emerging technologies and their potential uses to support delivery of business value.
• Experience in developing and championing technology strategies.

Do you have these attributes?

• Strong influencing, persuading and communicating skills and the ability to lead through influence.
• The mature judgement necessary to challenge and validate ideas to help a team choose the best solution to complex problems.
• Ability to self manage your time and work across a broad portfolio of stakeholders
• A fast learner, with a curiosity and passion for learning and self-improvement.
• Ability to communicate at all levels and translate technical jargon for non-technical staff.
• Ability to devise strategic vision and to articulate that vision confidently to all audiences.
• Ability to make informed decisions based on empirical evidence
• Able to work collaboratively and maintain effective relationships at all levels within an organisation.
• Self-motivated with the ability to inspire others with energy, drive and desire to achieve goals.

Package Description

Band: D

Contract type: Permanent – full time

Location: Salford – Dock House

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.

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.