Principal Software Engineer

JOB DETAILS

Job Band: D
Contract: Permanent
Location: London, Newcastle, Salford, Glasgow, Cardiff – Hybrid (1 day per week in the office)
Department: BBC Media Tech - Graphics and Automn Software Engineering
Proposed Salary: up to £83,790 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. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

Join the BBC’s Graphics & Automation team as a Principal Software Engineer, shaping the systems and services that power the BBC’s real-time and post-production graphics for News, Sport, iPlayer, Sounds, Streams and more, as well as studio and gallery automation systems that drive hundreds of hours of live output every day. You will lead technical direction across the software development team, ensuring graphics scenes can be hosted, managed and controlled at scale both on-premises and in the cloud, and play a key role in evolving the platforms that deliver the BBC’s iconic brand across daily live broadcasts, large scale events, and social media.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

You’ll be working at the heart of a brilliant team with a passion for broadcast and graphics, at a time where we’re delivering huge value to the BBC by transitioning the graphics estate to an in-house HTML based solution, GSAAS (Graphics Scenes As A Service). The team is spread across the country and offers plenty of opportunity to visit our studios and galleries as we integrate our software with automation solutions and newsroom systems. We also support operators in key large-scale events such as elections, where our graphics systems deal with the ingest of data and the control of driving data-driven graphics to air.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT

• Provide technical leadership across the Graphics & Automation team
• Shape architecture and guide long-term technical direction across Graphics & Automation
• Drive engineering excellence, including observability, reliability and operational practices
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Architecture to align technical and product priorities

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:

• Strong experience writing front-end applications using react + typescript, microservices with nodejs + typescript, or back-end applications with Java
• Experience using or integrating with one or more broadcast graphics system such as Viz Artist / Viz Engine, Ross XPression or CasparCG
• Experience using or integrating with one or more studio automation system such as Sofie, Viz Mosart, or Ross Overdrive
• Experience building broadcast graphics with HTML and CSS
• Experience using kubernetes and managing deployments of services on kubernetes clusters using Helm
  

DESIRABLE:

• Experience influencing technical direction and engineering practices across development teams
• Proven ability to collaborate across teams and influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience building broadcast graphics with HTML and CSS
• Experience of CI/CD workflows using github actions
• Experience of deploying to the cloud, particularly EKS

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.