Principal Software Engineer in Glasgow

Step into the world of the BBC, one of the UK's most iconic and trusted brands, where technology plays a critical role in delivering content to millions of people every day. Our Software Engineering teams build and operate innovative products and platforms that help keep the BBC at the forefront of the industry.

Core Data Platform is part of Data Platform, providing trusted, fast, and reliable access to audience and business data that enables a more data-informed and personalized BBC. We support personalized experiences across BBC products, including iPlayer and Sounds, while providing a platform used by 140+ weekly active users across our data community, including analysts, scientists, and engineers. This role offers the opportunity to work with data at scale and build highly scalable data platforms and ingestion pipelines.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT

• Lead the optimisation, performance, and evolution of the organisation's data lake and data warehouse platforms, ensuring scalable, cost-effective data services while enabling future architectural improvements and modernisation initiatives.
• Support and enhance the platforms and services that underpin audience personalisation and data access across the organisation, enabling stakeholders to efficiently query, analyse, and consume data while maintaining the performance, reliability, and operational support of business-critical services.
• Partner with architects, product leaders, and stakeholders to shape the long-term technical vision, technical goals and system architecture, support architectural decisions for scalable and maintainable systems.
• Guide the use of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices with AWS CDK and CloudFormation to provision and manage secure and maintainable cloud environments.
• Design and support CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, and other tools, with an emphasis on reliability, reusability, and performance.
• Contribute to the design and integration of monitoring and observability solutions (CloudWatch, Grafana) to ensure infrastructure and Warehouse health.
• Champion software engineering excellence through Test-Driven Development (TDD), rigorous test automation, and continuous quality assurance practices across team and wider department.
• Cultivate a high-performing engineering culture through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and thought leadership via deep dives, brown bags, internal tech talks, and cross-team collaboration, advocate for security best practices across the software development lifecycle using AWS-native tools and DevSecOps principles.

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Extensive experience in DevOps/DataOps roles with demonstrated impact in building, scaling, including progressive delivery strategies, resilience engineering, and performance optimisation.
• Expertise with databases (DynamoDB, Redis, Aurora, Athena) and strong experience with AWS services such as S3, EC2, SQS, Lambda, IAM, Managed Airflow, VPC, with a strong command of cloud solution architecture.
• Advanced proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code practices using AWS CDK, CloudFormation with CI/CD best practices with hands-on expertise in GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitOps workflows.
• Deep understanding of cloud security, governance, and compliance, with the ability to define and implement scalable security frameworks with a track record designing and developing software with scale, security and reliability in mind.
• Extensive experience in at least one of the programming languages such as Python.

If you can bring some of these skills and experiences, along with transferable strengths, we’d love to hear from you and encourage you to apply.

Benefits

• Fair pay and flexible benefits including a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym.
• Excellent career and professional development.
• Support in your working life, including flexible working which you can discuss with us at any point during the application, selection or offer.
• A values-based organisation where the way we do things is important as what we do.

We are a disability confident employer. If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, or to carry out this role, please contact us via email and we’d be happy to discuss: reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk

We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief.