Principal Software Engineer/UAS Service Owner (myBBC)

Job description

Service owners play a key role in our engineering function providing whole life technical ownership of our development. Working closely with Product Leads the Service Owners ensure that development is consistent with our world-class quality values and total cost of ownership concerns. They are empowered to recruit, mentor and lead a pool of talented engineers defining the standards, design patterns, tooling and processes to deliver to our audiences.

The Prinicipal Software Engineer / UAS(User Activity Service) Service Owner will initially work with our 3rd party supplier to develop this service, whilst concurrently recruiting and forming the longer term team that will further develop and support the UAS.

The UAS stores ‘user events’ that contribute to the myBBC mission – i.e. events that assert an interest in specific BBC content. These include playing content in iPlayer, bookmarking content (as a favourite), reading an article… The UAS therefore provides the core information needed to power personalisation services across bbc.co.uk, on all devices.

Demands will be high regards security, appropriate protection of personal data, and meeting the business’s performance thresholds. Audience trust is at the foundation of the BBC and hence data security is paramount. The Service Owner must be able to promote best practise with respect to security and ensure all deliveries adhere to that best practise.

To meet the service’s high performance demands we are delivering on the AWS elastic architecture with a view to establishing a continuous delivery approach. With a new team to be recruited this is an exciting time to join us and to influence the shape of software development within one of the UKs most influential organisations.

Role Responsibility

The key responsibilities of the Principal Software Engineer will include the following: 

· Support product management with stakeholder engagement, evangelizing the benefits of the service
· Support definition of new product offerings
· Scope and shape feasibility of these capabilities
· Own and drive technical service innovation, while delivering end to end engineering excellence
· Ensure the compliance of delivered product with functional and non-functional requirements
· Manage / oversee a mutli-disciplinary scrum team(s)
· Manage releases and the service transition to live
· Implement and oversee the in-life operations model
· Oversee the full operational lifecycle, including sunset as applicable
· At all times to promote skills and knowledge share, investing new ideas and skills into the core team.
· Recruit, mentor and grow a high performing engineering team.
· To work with partners and 3rd party technology suppliers in the delivery of product increments.

 

The Ideal Candidate

The skills and experience of the Principal Software Engineer will include: 

· Solid software engineering experience, including software design using various design patterns.
· Experience of managing development in an agile environment
· Experience of relational and no-sql databases and data warehouse applications.
· Hands on experience of AWS.
· Experience of writing REST APIs.
· Actively practising software testing techniques including TDD.
· Experience of message-driven distributed systems.
· Experience of working with source control systems.
· A track record of producing maintainable code within collaborative environments.
· Ability to rapidly acquire new skills and to work with new technologies.

Desirable :

· Knowledge of public sector security and privacy policies
· Experience working with high traffic / high performance systems.
· Experience with Web Service security issues
· An appreciation of BBC output and a passion for technology in the new media environment 

About the Company

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are very important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below. You’ll be asked questions relating to them as part of your application for this role.