Principal Data Engineer

Job Band

Package description

Band: D
Contract Permanent

Salary : GBP65,000 to GBP85,000 depending on level of experience

Location: Salford, and Newcastle

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 with the job reference in the subject.

Introduction

Product Group is responsible for the design, development, and delivery of the BBC's portfolio of digital products.

Including iPlayer, Sounds, Bitesize, and the BBC News and BBC Sport apps and website, our portfolio is diverse and contains some of the largest and highest-profile properties on the UK internet. We're a huge streaming media destination, a news source trusted across the world, a provider of educational and entertaining content to children of all ages, and a sports results, analysis, and commentary service, and much more besides. It's an unparalleled portfolio of products, and our strength is our range and breadth. Working with the BBC's content divisions, our focus now is on driving engagement across our portfolio so that the BBC online becomes a valued daily habit for all audiences just as television and radio have been over the last century.

Data is fundamental to our future: both in helping us prioritise and shape our work and in creating richer, more personalised experiences for our audiences. And our portfolio means that we've got one of the widest, most diverse, and most exciting datasets to work within the UK.

The role responsibilities

The Principal Data Engineer is a new role that will support the newly created Product Data Domain teams. You will help to build ETL pipelines to ingest and transform data to develop the data products that will power key value use cases across the BBC. You will work in an agile multi-disciplinary team alongside product analytics developers, product data managers, data modelers and data operations managers, ensuring that all work delivers maximum value to the BBC.

Role and responsibilities will comprise of:

Leads and architects on developing robust and scalable complex data pipelines to ingest, transform, and analyse large volumes of structured and unstructured data from diverse data sources. Pipelines must be optimised for performance, reliability, and scalability in line with the BBC's scale.
Lead initiatives to enhance data quality, governance and security across the organisation, ensuring compliance with BBC guidelines and industry best practices.
Prioritises stakeholders requirements and identify the best solution for timely delivery.
Leads on building automation workflows including monitoring and alerting.
Encouraging and mentoring team members in partnership with other disciplines to create value with data across the wider organisation.
Helps set standards for coding, testing and other engineering practices.
Leads on the building and testing of business continuity & disaster recovery procedures per requirements.
Proactively evaluates and provides feedback on future technologies and new releases/upgrades based on deep understanding of the domain.

Are you the right Candidate

When it comes to data engineering at the BBC we look for the following skills.

Technical skills

Extensive (5+ years) experience in a data engineering or analytics engineering role, preferably in digital products.
Extensive experience in building ETL pipelines, ingesting data from a diverse set of data sources (including event streams, various forms of batch processing)
Excellent SQL and python skills.
Extensive use of cloud technologies such as AWS and GCP.
Good working knowledge of Data Warehousing technologies (such as AWS Redshift, GCP BigQuery or Snowflake).
Experience in deploying and scheduling code bases in a data development environment, using technologies such as Airflow.
Demonstrable experience of working alongside cross-functional teams interacting with Product Managers, Infrastructure Engineers, Data Scientists, and Data Analysts.

Teamwork and stakeholder management

Ability to listen to others' ideas and build on them
Ability to clearly communicate to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Ability to collaborate effectively, working alongside other team members towards the team's goals, and enabling others to succeed, where possible.
Ability to prioritise. A structured approach and ability to bring other on the journey.
Strong attention to detail

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.