Lead Architect

Package Description

Salary range: up to £110,000
Contract type: permanent
Location: Salford, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff

Our comprehensive benefits package includes:
‚ An employer pension contribution of up to 10%
‚ 26 days’ annual leave (based on full time hours) + bank holidays and the option to buy/sell additional days
‚ Contributory lifestyle benefit options including discounts at hundreds of retailers, cycle to work scheme, discounted gym memberships and healthcare schemes
‚ Employee assistance and well-being programmes
‚ Learning and development tailored to your role – this could include industry recognised qualifications, coaching and mentoring
‚ An inclusive and diverse environment with opportunities to join staff networks including: Women’s Network, National Disability Networks and many more.

Family friendly flexible working arrangements, such as hybrid working, job sharing, flexi-time and compressed hours can be requested.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and especially welcome individuals from underrepresented groups.
If you require any reasonable adjustments at any time, please let us know by contacting us on [email protected]with the job reference in the subject.

Job introduction

We’re responsible for the Data Platform which provides the collection of our audience behavioural analytical data, tooling to ingest this and other business critical data sets, providing scalable data platform capabilities that enable the governing, storage, processing, transforming, publishing, and visualising of these data sets for the organisation. This provides the foundations to enable critical use-cases such as AI/ML, Experimentation, and the adoption of data domain ownership through providing scalable and consistent enablement capabilities.

The Data Platform is a key enabler of the BBC’s Data Strategy; hence we are looking to expand the Architecture Leadership of the platform. This key role will be responsible for realising the architectural oversight of our data platform focusing specifically on ingest of our analytical data making this data available, guiding the platforms development and evolution to support the ambition of the organisation.

Our architects are embedded into agile, cross-functional teams, where you will work alongside data professional (science, modelling, analysis), product, delivery, editorial, engineering, and user experience specialists, as well as key stakeholders, at all stages of development.

You will also work closely with and alongside other architects in the Product Group to contribute to the strategy for the services which manage content and metadata and audience data.

We are looking for someone to be an advocate for the needs of the users of these capabilities and who can communicate with a broad community such as data professionals and users of machine learning, as well as the wider engineering community across the BBC.

We want the BBC to be as renowned for the quality of its engineering as it is for the quality of its content. We aspire to be the best so that we can engineer outstanding digital products, at scale. Working here in an architecture role means working in a collaborative environment, being part of a world-class team and a chance to do the most meaningful work of your career.

Interview process:

This role will follow a two-stage interview process:

1. A 60min competency-based interview, the themes of the questions will be shared beforehand.
2. A 90min technical interview where candidates are expected to present a system they have worked on and a 30min scenario-based question.

Main responsibilities

On a typical day, you will:

• You will build effective relationships and work with multi-disciplinary teams, product owners, stakeholders, architects, and relevant 3rd-party suppliers to ensure the predictable and reliable delivery of our goals aligned with the department’s technical guidelines and strategy.
• You will assist the engineering teams with the definition of project scope and technical approach during project inception and to assist in the definition of implementation.
• You will assist the department’s architecture team in identifying strategic requirements, business risks and advising on cross platform roadmaps and migration plans to achieve strategic goals.
• You will provide technical advice and consultancy to our management, commissioning, and project teams on matters of technical architecture and infrastructure developments, including their feasibility.
• You will assist with improving the standard of technical delivery and expertise within the engineering teams through coaching and mentoring staff.
• You will be responsible for communicating and documenting the technical architecture of our systems.
• This role does not usually involve line management, but as a technical expert you will guide & mentor more junior colleagues in our technical disciplines.

The day-to-day

• Culture: In this role, you’ll be embedded within our cross-discipline development teams, working closely with product, engineering, QA and user experience teams. Every day you’ll collaborate with a wide range of high-calibre professionals, of all disciplines. We have an open and respectful culture where everyone’s opinions are valued.
• Location: Our team is based across the country, and predominately work remotely, occasionally coming together for collaboration. We have main development hubs for machine learning teams in Glasgow and London, and we have stakeholders based across the UK.
• Growth: This is a flexible role, which you can shape based on how you’d like to grow your skills and career. There are always plenty of opportunities to learn, take on new responsibilities, attend conferences, and so much more.

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons 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.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.