Software Engineer
JOB DETAILS
JOB BAND: C
CONTRACT TYPE: 12 Month Fixed Term Contract, Full-time
DEPARTMENT: Digital Distribution
LOCATION: London Broadcasting House – 2 Days a week in office Hybrid
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £52,500 - £57,500 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
PURPOSE OF THE ROLE
Media Distribution Analytics is the team that knows what your streaming experience was while watching the World Cup on iPlayer or listening to your favourite podcast on BBC Sounds. The BBC’s future is dependent on delivering content to an ever-growing online audience and setting the industry standard for a world-class on-demand and live streaming experience. That means playing content back flawlessly and offering the best quality media to our audience, so that we continue to deliver news, entertainment and the UK's most prestigious live events that delight our audiences.
To achieve these goals the Media Distribution Analytics team develop the data products and pipelines that ingest, measure and visualise the audience experience and allow us to take action, often in real-time, in addition to informing long term capacity requirements and performance. This is a data engineering team that processes enormous quantities of data, and works closely with device playback and the BBC’s own Content Distribution Network team (BIDI), as well as third party network suppliers, to help make the online streaming experience the best it can possibly be.
WHY JOIN THE TEAM
Joining the Media Distribution Analytics team as a software engineer is a chance to work on high-impact, real-time data systems that improve how millions experience BBC content. You’ll collaborate with a team of experienced engineers, build scalable data pipelines, and contribute to cutting-edge streaming analytics - a unique opportunity to shape the future of online media distribution at the BBC.
YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT:
• Design and build data products to understand media distribution within the BBC.
• Maintain and extend a petabyte-scale data lake and ETL process.
• Develop our real-time stream processing pipeline used for operational monitoring.
• Collaborate with stakeholders and engineers to find new requirements, ensure products are impactful and add value.
• Contribute to culture of engineering excellence
YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:
• Production experience using a programming language commonly used in data engineering—such as Python, SQL, or Java—and openness to learning others
• Strong understanding of the fundamentals of databases—whether relational, object storage, or data warehouses—and knowledge of the state of the art in modern datalake and data modelling tools
• Hands-on experience with batch or streaming data pipelines and are keen to deepen your knowledge of tools like Spark, Kafka, or Flink.
• Production experience with cloud services (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience working with 3rd party data providers, expressing requirements and driving improvement in their service
DESIRABLE:
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and its use to deploy Data Products at scale
• You love working with data and building data products that help shape user experiences.
• Experience in working with data visualization tools (such as Looker, Grafana, or PowerBI) to communicate insights from data
• Enjoy collaborating in cross-functional teams and being comfortable asking questions, seeking feedback, and learning from others
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.
