Principal Software Engineer

JOB DETAILS

JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent 
DEPARTMENT: BBC Media Services
LOCATION: London – Hybrid 
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £70,000 - £80,000 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

Media Services powers the BBC’s online audio and video delivery, enabling billions of iPlayer streams every year. As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll shape the systems and standards behind this critical platform. You will lead technical direction, guide teams in modern engineering practices, and help deliver resilient, scalable and secure services that keep the BBC at the forefront of digital media.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM
You’ll join a collaborative engineering community working at the heart of the BBC’s digital transformation. Media Services offers meaningful technical challenges, a culture of learning, and the freedom to explore modern cloud native and event driven architectures. You’ll work with talented multidisciplinary teams to deliver solutions with real public impact — and help shape the future of how audiences experience BBC content.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT:
As a Principal Engineer, you’ll take a leading role in designing, building and evolving the distributed systems that power Media Services. You’ll collaborate with architects, team leads and fellow engineers to define engineering standards, drive technical strategy and support delivery across the full software development lifecycle. You’ll explore new approaches, improve observability, resolve complex issues and mentor engineers at all levels. 

Key responsibilities 
• Lead the design and development of high quality, secure and scalable distributed services. 
• Set and champion engineering standards, modern patterns and best practices across teams. 
• Drive cloud native development approaches including automated testing, CI/CD and observability driven design. 
• Partner with product, architecture and engineering teams to shape solutions from inception to production. 
• Guide teams through complex problem solving, troubleshooting and continuous improvement. 
• Mentor and coach engineers, supporting skills development and fostering a healthy engineering culture. 
• Produce and maintain clear, accessible technical documentation to support knowledge sharing.

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
You will have:
•    Proficiency in a mainstream object oriented programming language (e.g. Java, C#, Python) and the ability to write clean, maintainable and well tested software.
•    Cloud native development experience, ideally with AWS services such as Lambda, Step Functions and EventBridge.
•    Experience designing and implementing microservices, APIs and distributed systems, with a strong understanding of event driven and message based architectural patterns.
•    Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing practices (TDD/BDD) and modern engineering approaches for secure, observable and resilient services.
•    Experience integrating software with monitoring, alerting and security tooling, with a mindset that values operational excellence.

Most importantly, you enjoy helping others grow and fostering a culture of learning, collaboration and continuous improvement.

If you can bring some of these skills and experience, 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.