BBC Jobs 2023 – Senior Software Engineer

About the job

Job Introduction

In BBC Home you’ll help build the next generation of the BBC online. Your work will be in front of tens of millions of people as we deliver world-class experiences via the BBC Homepage and use our Topics capability to power some of the BBC’s biggest products in News, Sport and programmes like Strictly Come Dancing or Dr Who. You’ll be involved in the work we’re doing to make BBC online a more participatory experience.

Our vision is to bring together everything the BBC produces in a personalised way, through connected services that allow you to interact directly with the BBC. By joining our team you will be given the opportunity to make a real difference to our mission to reinvent the BBC online for a new generation.

Our agile teams are made up of software engineers, testers, user experience designers, design researchers, product owners, business analysts and project managers, all striving to create extraordinary experiences for our audiences.

Learning, developing and sparking curiosity is part our culture, so you will be joining a team who really care about you, the development of your technical skills, your career aspirations and your contribution to our great team culture.

How We Work

In BBC Home we build our products following Continuous Delivery practises, builds run with fully automated pipelines, deploying to live multiple times a day.

We build fully responsive web solutions across multiple devices and we create the backend services that drive them using Node.JS and AWS cloud technologies. Our services are highly available and highly scalable so we build following service-oriented architecture and micro-service architectural patterns.

We follow agile development methodologies and practice Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and advocate pair programming.

We focus on the key non-functional requirements that are important to our audience – performance, security and accessibility. We excel at collaboration and often we work closely with other teams in the BBC – and external companies – to push our capabilities further.

Role Responsibility

What We’re Looking For

This role is within our Data Capabilities team. The team is responsible to develop new backend services which are used by audience facing products such as the BBC Homepage and Topics, to build new features for the audience. Our APIs are developed in Node.JS and deployed on AWS. We power different use cases, from providing BBC Programme data to enabling personalisable content to create more dynamic web and app experiences.

In the coming months, we will be building on top of these backend services, adding richer features, exploring new capabilities, and experimenting how we can use BBC data to power more dynamic and personalised experiences for the audience.

The team runs on a mode “you build it, you run it”. So we are not only implementing features to these APIs, but we also manage the CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure on AWS, monitoring, maintainance, performance and security required to run these services at scale in production. We are using Node.JS and many AWS services such as CDK, Lambda, OpenSearch, EventBridge, SQS, CodeBuild & CodePipeline, API Gateway, AppSync, Cloudwatch…

As a Senior Software Engineer you will be expected to take the lead in the design and implementation of new requirements, ensure on time delivery of robust, industry leading solutions.

You’ll have a strong background in software development and in depth knowledge of design principles and patterns.

You’ll drive engineering best practices within the team – helping implement and ensure we follow good practices such as CI/CD, TDD, infrastructure as code, cloud architecture and pair/mob programming.

You’ll have some experience of mentoring junior team members and be committed to helping with their development.

You’ll love learning new technologies and are able to evaluate them and apply these to a variety of projects.

You’ll have a positive attitude and a willingness to learn. You’ll promote your skills, share your knowledge and contribute to the evolution of best practices throughout the department and the BBC.

Are you the right candidate?

The Ideal Candidate For This Role Will

• Actively encourage pairing and working collaboratively with the team
• Have strong development skills and experience building applications (Node.JS and AWS technologies)
• Have experience of test driven development, with both unit and integration tests
• Have experience with infrastructure as code and devops practices
• Have experience of working in an agile team
• Mentor and support peers, actively advocating for best practices

Package Description

Band: D

Contract type: Permanent- Full time

Location: Glasgow – Pacific Quay

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 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 Values Guide
• Job Description