Principal Software Engineer
BBC Media Action
Software Engineering
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
GBP 65k-80k / year
JOB DETAILS
JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent
DEPARTMENT: BBC Product Group – Data Platforms
LOCATION: Newcastle - Hybrid
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £65,000 - £80,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage
PURPOSE OF THE ROLE
Join the BBC’s Data Sourcing teams and help shape the future of our streaming and analytics platforms. As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll provide technical leadership across critical ingestion and real-time data systems, helping teams deliver scalable, resilient, and high-performing platforms that enable data-driven decision making across the BBC.
WHY JOIN THE TEAM
Data Sourcing sits at the heart of how the BBC understands and serves its audiences across News, Sport, TV, and Radio. You’ll work with modern cloud and streaming technologies, help shape the evolution of our real-time data ecosystem, and play a key role in growing the BBC’s engineering culture within the Newcastle Tech Hub.
YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT
- Provide technical leadership across streaming, ingestion, and analytics platforms used across the BBC.
- Drive engineering standards, architectural direction, and platform evolution across multiple teams.
- Support the continued evolution of the BBC’s real-time streaming and data platforms, helping improve scalability, resilience, and operational maturity.
- Work closely with other Principal Engineers and technical leaders to maintain high engineering standards and support consistent technical practices across teams.
- Help teams design and deliver scalable cloud-based services and data pipelines across a range of technologies and engineering domains.
- Mentor and support engineers at all levels, helping grow technical capability, engineering culture, and modern software development practices.
- Work closely with engineering, product, and platform stakeholders to solve complex technical challenges and enable effective delivery.
YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:
- Strong experience designing and operating large-scale distributed or event-driven systems.
- Hands-on experience with streaming and data technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Spark, or similar platforms.
- Experience building scalable cloud-based services, ideally within AWS environments and modern backend technologies such as Java/Spring Boot or TypeScript.
- Ability to lead technical decision-making and influence engineering direction across teams.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with experience mentoring engineers and working across multidisciplinary teams.
DESIRABLE:
- Experience working with real-time analytics or large-scale data ingestion platforms.
- Experience working across a broad range of technologies, platforms, and engineering domains within multi-team environments.
- Familiarity with observability, operational monitoring, CI/CD, and platform reliability practices.
- Experience with data technologies such as Airflow, Redshift, DynamoDB, MongoDB, or similar tooling.
- Interest in contributing to engineering culture, standards, and the wider technology community.
TECH STACK:
Our teams work across a broad range of technologies and platforms. While this role will primarily support our real-time streaming and ingestion platforms, our Principal Engineers collaborate across multiple teams and engineering domains.
Technologies currently used across our teams include:
- Java / Spring Boot and TypeScript / JavaScript
- AWS services including MSK, Lambda, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, Redshift, and SQS
- Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Airflow, Spark, and EventBridge
- SQL and NoSQL databases including Postgres, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Timestream
- CI/CD and automation tooling including GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and CodePipeline
- Observability and visualisation tooling including Grafana and Tableau
Our wider engineering ecosystem also includes web and mobile technologies, including TypeScript/JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin, alongside a range of testing, analytics, and operational tooling.
If you can bring some of these skills and experiences, 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.
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
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.
This is your BBC
At the BBC you can create and innovate in an inclusive environment while contributing to some of the world’s best loved content, and the BBC’s mission to inform, educate and entertain.
Life at BBC
Here you will benefit from:
• Fair pay and flexible benefits including a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym.
• Excellent career and professional development.
• Support in your working life, including flexible working which you can discuss with us at any point during the application, selection or offer.
• A values-based organisation where the way we do things is important as what we do.
Benefits may vary if you are joining on an FTC basis or on an orchestra conditions contract.
Learn more about life at the BBC and our values in our candidate pack.
You belong
We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, so all our employees feel that they can belong, thrive and achieve their full potential.
We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to join us. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.
We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief.
Find out more about diversity, inclusion and belonging in our strategy below.
Disability confident
We are a disability confident employer. If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, or to carry out this role, please contact us via email and we’d be happy to discuss: reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk
