BBC Career Opportunities: Senior Data Engineer

JOB DETAILS

JOB TITLE: Senior Software Engineer - Data
JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time
DEPARTMENT: Archives Technology & Services
LOCATION: Glasgow Pacific Quay or Salford Dock House or Newcastle-upon-Tyne Broadcasting Centre or Belfast Broadcasting House or Cardiff Central Square. 1 day a week Hybrid
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE:  £63,000 - £73,000 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

Senior Data Engineer is a hybrid technical/analytical role providing the opportunity to play a key role in analysing a rich seam of broadcast metadata stretching back over 100 years.

As a Senior Data Engineer in the AT&S Data Platform team, you will serve as a data subject matter expert, anchor and visionary for our next-generation media metadata platform – Media Content Catalogue. You will be involved with the design, scaling, and optimisation of this modern, cloud-scale lakehouse built on Apache Spark, AWS Glue, and Apache Iceberg/Parquet, transforming complex broadcast & archival media metadata into structured, aggregated, unified, high-performance data assets.

In this role, you will bridge the gap between data analysis & design and hands-on execution, ensuring our data ecosystem delivers the low-latency querying, strict schema evolution, and robust transactional consistency required to power real-time broadcasting insights and downstream archival and media reuse applications.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

Our team uses many of the latest technologies in cloud data engineering, inspires experimentation & innovation and has autonomy. We are a highly productive, multi-disciplinary team working in a modern, agile way. You will be working on great projects and will be surrounded by a team of like-minded technology professionals from whom you can learn and grow. This is an environment where we love to share ideas and challenge the traditional with our goal of taking the BBC on the journey to be a digital-first organisation.
 
Data engineering is a rapidly evolving field, so we offer regular training and development opportunities including 10% time to allow for self-improvement, learning, experimentation and innovation. We have a focus on good quality management to help enable, guide and empower others. We promote a healthy work-life balance with opportunities for flexible working hours.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT:

As a Senior Data Engineer in the AT&S Data Platform team, you’ll help analyse a wide variety of media metadata sources and contribute to the design, build, and maintenance of a cutting-edge cloud data lake which unites the BBC’s multitude of media metadata sources, empowering the search, discovery and broadcast re-use workflows of the future.

You’ll work with engineers, data analysts, and product managers to deliver reliable and scalable solutions that underpin the BBC’s archive content discovery and reuse lifecycle for many years to come.

The role focuses on:

-    Developing high-quality data schemas, code, tests, documentation and scripts; ensuring they are understandable, maintainable, observable and minimise risk.
-    Develop shared data schemas and contracts for interoperation with upstream and downstream BBC metadata and search systems
-    Participate in the team’s software development methodologies, such as pairing, code and documentation review, and continuous delivery. Learning about new technologies and techniques and assess their applicability and usefulness to our products and our users.
-    Help troubleshoot and resolve issues throughout the data life cycle
-    Participate in the team's agile planning and delivery processes
-    Contribute to engineering best practices, testing, and deployment pipelines

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:

-    Demonstrable experience of delivering data-powered applications in production

-    Hands-on experience with modern cloud data analysis & engineering (we use SQL, Python, AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, Apache Parquet, Apache Spark)

-    Experience of modern data transformation pipeline tools such as dbt or SQLMesh

-    Working experience of data modelling (e.g. Entity-Relationship)

-    Experience of managing data quality, for example Great Expectations, AWS Glue Data Quality

DESIRABLE:

-    Knowledge of broadcast media metadata and encoding formats

-    Experience of next generation data tooling such as DuckDB, Polars etc