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.
• Developing shared data schemas and contracts for interoperation with upstream and downstream BBC metadata and search systems.
• Participating 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.
• Helping troubleshoot and resolve issues throughout the data life cycle.
• Participating in the team's agile planning and delivery processes.
• Contributing to engineering best practices, testing, and deployment pipelines.

Essential Criteria

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Demonstrable experience of delivering data-powered applications in production.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud data engineering (we use AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, Apache Parquet, Apache Spark).
• Experience of modern data transformation pipeline tools such as dbt or SQLMesh.
• Active experience of both Python and SQL.
• 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.

Disclaimer

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.

Please note: If you were to be offered this role, the BBC will conduct Employment screening checks which include Reference checks; Eligibility to work checks; and if applicable to the role, Safeguarding and Adverse media/Social media checks. Any offer made is conditional on these checks being satisfactory.

Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Recruitment 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.

For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk

We are unable to accept applications via CV and only applications made online will be considered. Please click on the APPLY NOW button to proceed with your application.

Redeployment

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