Principal Software Engineer

CONTRACT TYPE: Perm

DEPARTMENT: BBC Media Tech, Platforms

LOCATION: London / Salford / Glasgow - Hybrid working

PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £80,000 - £87,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights. We're happy to discuss flexible working.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

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.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

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 personalised BBC. We support personalised 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

Essential

• 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, Athena etc, 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.

Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Contracts of Employment policy. This allows us to discuss any support you may need and assess any risks. Failure to disclose may result in the withdrawal of your offer.

Disclaimer

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.

Please note: If you were to be offered this role, the BBC will conduct Employment screening checks which include Reference checks; Eligibility to work checks; and if applicable to the role, Safeguarding and Adverse media/Social media checks. Any offer made is conditional on these checks being satisfactory.

For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk

Redeployment

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

Information at a Glance

This is your BBC At the BBC you can create and innovate in an inclusive environment while contributing to some of the world's best loved content, and the BBC's mission to inform, educate and entertain.

Life at BBC

• 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.

Benefits may vary if you are joining on an FTC basis or on an orchestra conditions contract. Learn more about life at the BBC and our values in our candidate pack.

You belong

We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, so all our employees feel that they can belong, thrive and achieve their full potential. We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to join us. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity. We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief.

Find out more about diversity, inclusion and belonging in our strategy below.

Diversity, inclusion & belonging strategy

Disability confident

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