Head of Architecture

Main Responsibilities

As Head of Architecture, you will define and support the delivery of the technical architecture in your area of responsibility. This includes both line management and setting overall strategy in a way that enables all engineering teams to work at scale and high efficiency.

This is a highly collaborative role. You will work closely with a wide range of engineering, product, and business leaders, and with multi-disciplinary teams across the organisation. You will use your communication and influencing skills to explain how your technical strategy contributes to wider business objectives, backed up by a coherent approach for delivering the strategy.

In this role you will be one of the most senior technologists at the BBC. You will play a critical role in the organisation’s digital transformation. Do you have the passion and drive to help shape the BBC’s digital future?

Your key day-to-day responsibilities will include:

•    Being part of the Product Group Engineering Leadership team, helping to drive the overall technology strategy with your peers.

•    Being part of one or multiple cross-discipline leadership teams, collaborating with Engineering, Product, Delivery, Data, UX, and other disciplines to develop successful products that grow the BBC’s online reach.

•    Line managing, coaching and developing a team of talented architects, as well as supporting a wide range of engineering and product teams.

•    Owning the technology landscape within your area, identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement, and taking accountability for ensuring solutions are performant and sustainable.

•    Playing a critical role in defining how to enable our platform strategy and engineering efficiency through capabilities that apply at all levels of our technical stack.

Area of Responsibility

In this role you will join three others with the Head of Architecture role to collectively own the architecture strategy and technical direction of the BBC’s online products. Together this architecture leadership – which is part of the engineering leadership – must ensure architectural alignment across all teams. Within this, your initial focus will be the ‘Enablement’ area, which provides the tools and services to ensure the BBC creates dependable and secure digital solutions in an efficient and manageable way.

As Head of Architecture for Enablement, your responsibilities will include:

•    Creating platforms and services that allow over 1000 engineers to safely develop on the cloud in a collaborative and efficient way. This includes tools to develop a common business layer, and the means to dependable scale to handle high levels of network traffic.

•    Architectural solutions for ensuring a robust operational approach, such as the ability to monitor and observe the whole technical estate.

•    Leading architectural approaches for partnerships and outsourced solutions.

•    Ensuring we follow the best engineering and architectural practices, with the right tools and techniques for everyone to understand and deliver the architecture strategy.

As mentioned above, it is likely that your areas of focus will change over time, for example to support new programmes of work.

You will be a line manager of 1-2 architects. This will likely grow over time.

Are you the right candidate?

The ideal candidate will evidence the following skills and experience:

· Significant experience as a technical architect (or similar role), including defining & delivering a technical vision and strategy, and designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable architectures.

· Proven digital leader, with gravitas to work effectively with senior colleagues as well as being able to inspire, motivate and drive change through a large engineering team.

· Ability to present to and influence C-Level colleagues, creating great interpersonal relationships across the organisation.

· A team player who can coach, develop and mentor others in our engineering community, and provide leadership amongst your peers.

· Significant experience leading in a software development environment, including agile delivery at scale, and with an informed view of architectural and engineering best-practice.

· Knowledge of a broad range of technology concepts such as cloud computing (e.g. AWS), micro-service architectures, event-driven architectures and data processing at scale. You will work with a range of specialist teams which may include machine learning, APIs and networking, and client applications (on web, mobile & TV).

· Approaches to standardisation and governance, such as to manage efficiency, security and legal compliance, in a way that balances standardisation with autonomy at scale.

· Strong organisational skills that enable you to work across multiple specialist teams to align architecture goals and drive change and adoption.

· Continued professional development both as a leader and technologist, including a deep understanding of industry trends (e.g., AI). You will be expected to proactively identify and leverage these trends to drive innovation. This includes staying ahead of emerging technologies, assessing their potential impact, and integrating relevant advancements into our architecture strategy to ensure we remain at the forefront of digital transformation.

About the BBC

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.

Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.

Benefits – we offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.

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 below document: https://performancemanager.successfactors.eu/S001190811T2/Our\_BBC\_Values.pdf

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.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please visit https://www.bbc.co.uk/diversity/

Package Description

Band: F

Contract type: 1 x continuing (permanent) role

Location: Flexible/Hybrid

Career Path Framework job pay range: up to £143,200.00 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.