Software Engineering Team Lead

BBC Group and Public Services; Newcastle upon Tyne; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Software Engineering Team Lead to spearhead a new project at the heart of digital transformation. This role offers the chance to lead a talented team while working on innovative solutions that enhance audience engagement. You'll be at the forefront of developing a unified API for BBC content, ensuring high-quality engineering practices. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of digital media while enjoying excellent career progression and unrivaled training opportunities within a supportive and diverse environment.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

25 days annual leave plus 5 optional days

Defined pension scheme

Discounted dental and health care

Gym membership discounts

Training and development opportunities

Qualifications

• Experience in leading software engineering teams and mentoring engineers.
• Strong background in software development and delivery of live systems.

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of engineers, fostering a collaborative and inclusive culture.
• Define technical direction and oversee the operational health of services.

Skills

Team Leadership

Software Development

Agile Methodologies

Collaboration

DevOps Practices

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Relevant Certifications

Tools

AWS

Node.js

TypeScript

Job description

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Software Engineering Team Lead

Software Engineering

Permanent - Full Time

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, GB, NE991RN

BBC PUBLIC SERVICE B'CAST

Job Closing Date: 18/05/2025

THE ROLE

• Job Reference: 23661
• Department: Content & Content Metadata
• Location: Newcastle (This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working)
• Reports to: Software Engineering Manager
• Band: D
• Salary: £70,000 – £80,000 (The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.)
• Closing Date for applications: Sunday 18th May 2025 at 23:59

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 membership. You can find out more about working at the BBC by selecting this link to our candidate pack .

The BBC is one of the UK’s most well-known and loved brands and is a unique and rewarding organisation to work for. We deliver content to millions of people globally every day.

The Unified Content Catalogue (UCC) team is a newly formed team working on a greenfield project responsible for designing, building, and supporting a central system to bring together much of the BBC’s content and metadata. Our goal is to expose BBC content via a single, unified API, making it easier for products and platforms to deliver rich, engaging experiences to audiences.

Descriptive, well-structured, and centralised metadata allows BBC products to provide a rich, engaging and above all relevant experience to millions of audience members every day, for all sorts of BBC content, across all manner of audience products.

We’re a cross-functional team and work with a varied technology stack that includes AWS cloud services, Node.js, TypeScript.

We want the BBC to be as renowned for the quality of its engineering as it is for the quality of its content. We aspire to be the best so that we can engineer outstanding digital products, at scale. Working here means being part of a world-class team and a chance to do the most meaningful work of your career. The BBC’s digital products play a key role in our mission to inform, educate and entertain the audience.

This is a great opportunity for you to take a leading position at the centre of a brand-new project at the heart of the BBC’s digital transformation.

Main Responsbilities

The Unified Content Catalogue team is looking for an experienced, professional, and enthusiastic Software Engineering Team Lead to join a world-class team responsible for designing, building, and delivering the BBC’s content metadata systems.

The role is partly management — developing, mentoring, and inspiring the engineers on the team — and partly hands-on technical work across a varied technical domain.

The team will be based in Newcastle, but you will collaborate regularly with colleagues across other BBC locations including Salford, Glasgow, and London, so you will be comfortable with the challenges of working with distributed teams.

As a team lead, your responsibilities will include:

People:

• Line management responsibilities for 4–6 engineers.
• Assisting with recruiting and onboarding new team members.
• Mentoring and developing team members and peers to help them to reach their potential.
• Inspiring and motivating the team to help them deliver a world-class audience experience.
• Helping to foster a collaborative and inclusive culture across the wider Content & Content Metadata.

Technical Leadership:

• Building, maintaining, and evolving the services powering our architecture, comprising a variety of engines, services, and user-facing tools.
• Playing a key role in defining the technical direction of the Unified Content Catalogue through collaboration with other engineering leads, as well as product and delivery colleagues.
• Ensuring the team’s technical direction and delivery are aligned with architectural and business goals.
• Overseeing the operational health of services, with a focus on observability, scalability, and resilience at scale.
• Driving best practices in monitoring, alerting, and incident response to ensure reliable service delivery.
• Advocating new technologies and approaches to ensure our products are industry leading.
• Providing domain expertise across the wider Unified Content Catalogue team and beyond.
• Ensuring a high standard of engineering excellence within our products.

Delivery:

• Working with cross-discipline partners to plan and commit to quarterly deliverables.
• Working with stakeholders across the organisation to align with goals and mission.
• Delivering features using agile development practices.
• Seeking out new tools and methodologies to evolve our development processes.

Are you the right candidate

You should have experience in some of the following:

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience working in a cross-discipline environment and working collaboratively with stakeholders
• Experience working within a multi-site team or department
• Experience working in a team responsible for the delivery and support of live software systems, with DevOps responsibilities

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 .

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.

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.