Lead Technical Architect

Job description

Band E

Ref: 17396

Salary range: £75,000 - £100,000

Contract type: permanent

Location: Cardiff, Glasgow, Newcastle, Salford, Birmingham.

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 [email protected] with the job reference in the subject.

Job introduction

•    Are you an experienced technical architect or technology leader?

•    Do you have an interest in creating world-class systems that have huge reach, for public good?

•    Do you want to develop ground-breaking ideas, work with cutting-edge technology, and help the BBC make incredible online experiences?

•    Do you want to work with a range of multi-disciplinary experts, including amazing development teams who focus on best-practice engineering?

This role is a Lead Technical Architect in the BBC’s Product Group. You’ll work on a range of BBC’s online products. A key focus will be on Search – improving the ability to search for content in iPlayer, Sounds, and the rest of BBC Online. This will involve working with search engines, machine-learning, recommendations engines, content catalogues, websites, mobile apps, and more.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about new technology opportunities, and new ways in which we can create services that entertain, educate, and inform. It’s an opportunity to make a difference, through being inventive and creative, and working with amazing teams.

In this role, you’ll work with several product and development teams, and with the BBC’s architecture teams. You’ll be influencing both the products you are directly responsible for, and the wider BBC Online.  You’ll need big-picture thinking on the opportunities, whilst also getting into the technical details of creating products on AWS and other platforms.

The tech challenges in this role are tricky. You’ll design and support the creation of many different solutions, in areas such as machine learning, data engineering, and scaled cloud computing. You’ll need to be across many projects and technologies, ensuring that they come together to make the best solution. It’s a role that will challenge you regularly, but colleagues and experts will support you at every step. And there’s great opportunity to learn and grow, whilst keeping a good work-life balance.

Interview process

Interview process:

•    A two-stage virtual interview.

•    Both stages are designed to learn about you and your experiences, as well as a chance to meet the key people you will work with.

•    The second stage will involve a short presentation to demonstrate your skills as a technology leader and communicator.

Main responsibilities

As a Lead Architect, you will join a team of technical leaders that shapes BBC Online, providing a service used by millions of people every day. It is a highly collaborative role, working with multiple teams and a range of disciplines (including engineering, product, delivery, UX, architecture, and data science).

You’ll be involved in a range of BBC projects and systems, with your first key responsibility being on the strategy to transform the BBC’s search capabilities. We aspire for search in iPlayer, Sounds, and the rest of the BBC to be the best there is – fast, relevant, contextualised, and personalised. To achieve this you’ll need to consider the end-to-end architecture – how content is created, promoted, discovered, and presented to users. The BBC has a wide variety of content, metadata, and systems that altogether impact how a great search service can be made. In this role you’ll be working across teams and systems to help drive search and related services forward. For example, you’ll work closely with the sister recommendations team, collaborating where sensible.

Search is a specialist technology area. It’s not essential that you have experience in this area, so long as you’re a fast learner and enjoy picking up new technologies. The BBC’s search capabilities use a mixture of Solr and ElasticSearch/OpenSearch. A key part of your role will be exploring how to move beyond a traditional lexical search approach into a more semantic (or hybrid) approach in which the intent of the content and search query are considered. This will likely involve technologies such as NLP and vector databases, and other areas of machine learning.

Overall, if you’re a lead technologist who’s passionate about collaborating on cutting-edge (yet pragmatic) tech solutions, through a systematic and data-driven approach, you’ll thrive in this role.

Are you the right candidate

•    Experience as a technical architect (or other similar strategic technologist) working with fast-moving agile product & engineering teams.

•    An excellent collaborator, working across teams, empowering and supporting others, and able to inspire & persuade.

•    A strong communicator, able to work with people of all levels and disciplines, helping to explain complicated technology solutions and their business benefits and implications.

•    Experience engineering data-powered systems on the cloud – such as event streaming (AWS Kinesis/Apache Kafka), APIs, schemas/contracts, and using data to power websites and apps.

•    Experience, or a willingness to learn, about machine learning and search technologies.

•    Able to consider big-picture strategy approaches, and also focus on details where necessary, such as key NFRs such as security, privacy, and reliability.

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 here.

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 click here.