Senior Software Engineer, Generative AI

BBC Group and Public Services; London; Hybrid; GBP 59,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

The BBC is looking for talented software engineers to join their team focusing on AI product development. This role combines exciting challenges, the opportunity for career progression, and a commitment to inclusivity and diversity within the workplace. Applicants will work on projects that impact millions of users while maintaining high engineering standards and best practices.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

25 days annual leave plus option to buy additional days

Defined pension scheme

Discounted dental and health care

Qualifications

• Strong coding skills in Python.
• Experience with cloud-based software on AWS.
• Hands-on experience training and evaluating ML models.

Responsibilities

• Writing clean, maintainable Python code for AI deployments.
• Designing and maintaining AWS infrastructure for AI.
• Collaborating with data scientists on model training.

Skills

Python

AWS

AI

DevOps

MLOps

Education

Relevant Computer Science degree or equivalent

Job description

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Salary: £59,600 - £69,800 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

Contract type: Permanent

Location: London, Glasgow or Salford. This is a hybrid role, and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working.

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 negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym. You can find out more about working at the BBC by selecting this link to our candidate pack .

Freelancers are eligible to apply for an internal role if they are on a Worker Contract and they have worked continuously for 6 months. If they have worked for less than 6 months continuously or have a break of 3 weeks or more between engagements, they must seek Divisional HR approval to apply for an internal role prior to submitting an application.

Job Intro

The BBC has been serving audiences online for more than 20 years. Across key products including BBC iPlayer, News, Sport, Weather and Sounds, we entertain, educate and inform audiences in their millions every day.

But behind the scenes we have work to do. We are making the shift from being a broadcaster that speaks to our audiences to becoming a service that is directly shaped by them and designed around their wants and needs. AI is fundamental to this journey: enriching and expanding our content, improving journalist workflows and powering personalised experiences for millions of audience members.

The new era of generative AI offers opportunities and challenges on a much larger scale. We are hiring software engineers across multiple seniority levels to join a cross-functional team that builds AI products for content production use cases, focusing on generative AI. This team builds products end-to-end, from innovative ideas to validated, scalable production systems serving thousands of internal users and improving the experience of millions. We work with our Responsible AI team to keep public service values at the heart of these products, ensuring they are aligned with our editorial values, serve the public good and maintain audience trust.

We are a friendly and supportive team, and we love that we get to work on interesting and important problems that have a real impact on the audience's experience and the future of the BBC. The BBC has an industry-leading engineering culture with a strong focus on best practice and a wide range of opportunities for learning and career growth. Diverse representation of people within the team is vital, and we work in an open, supportive and inclusive manner.

This team will build AI services that integrate with user-facing applications, working closely with front-end engineering teams. Recent projects include:

• Fine-tuning and deploying open-source large language models on use cases that assist journalists and build audience engagement.
• Developing and deploying generative AI solutions to produce content metadata and improve the experience of hundreds of journalists and millions of users worldwide.

Main Responsibilities

• Writing clean, maintainable, well-tested production code in Python.
• Designing, building, iterating on and maintaining AWS infrastructure for AI deployments, e.g. optimised LLM inference on GPUs, reliable model training and fine-tuning pipelines, CI/CD pipelines, data stores, model development environments, interfaces with 3rd party models and scalable APIs.
• Working with data scientists to train and evaluate in-house ML models and systems based on 3rd party models, build and validate prototypes then scale up into performant production systems.
• Following and iterating on our software engineering best practices such as code reviews, pair programming, TDD, model/data versioning, linting, automated test coverage analysis, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and clear and comprehensive documentation.
• Responding to production issues and outages, building monitoring infrastructure to ensure those instances are identified quickly and dealt with effectively and conducting PIRs and iterating on our infrastructure to ensure they don’t happen again.
• Researching and experimenting with new AI technologies as they emerge.
• Supporting more junior colleagues.
• Closely collaborating with other engineers and cross-functional teammates and stakeholders, attending Agile ceremonies like stand-ups, retros, sprint planning and knowledge sharing sessions.
• Engaging with the wider engineering and ML community at the BBC.

Are you the right candidate?

We are open to a range of backgrounds, from ML engineers with hands-on model training and deployment experience, to DevOps and MLOps engineers to strong general software engineers with a real desire to learn about AI.

You are encouraged to apply even if you don’t meet every one of the criteria listed!

• Strong coding skills, preferably in Python.
• Expertise in software engineering best practices such as testing and code management and deployment.
• Experience designing and building cloud-based software, preferably on AWS.
• Ability to clearly communicate to both technical and non-technical team members.
• Ability to work effectively in a cross functional team.
• Experience leading technical projects and engaging with stakeholders.
• A strong interest in AI.
• DevOps/MLOps experience, e.g. deploying ML models, setting up training pipelines, model registries, monitoring etc.
• Hands-on experience training and evaluating ML models.
• Managing databases and data pipelines.
• Experience with generative AI.
• Mentorship of more junior colleagues.

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 behaviourshere .

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 clickhere .

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.

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.

Information at a Glance

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.

Find out more about the BBC

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 pensionscheme 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.

Learn more about life at the BBC and our values in our candidate pack.

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.

Diversity, inclusion & belonging strategy

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: [e-mail]

BBC Group and Public Services, Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London, United Kingdom, W1A 1AA. BBC Studios Distribution Limited, company no: 01420028, registered address: 1 Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, London, United Kingdom W12 7FA.