Software Engineering Team Lead

ZipRecruiter; Newcastle upon Tyne; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a leading media organization as a Software Engineering Team Lead, where you'll guide a talented team in building and delivering innovative content metadata systems. This hybrid role in Newcastle offers excellent career progression, training opportunities, and a competitive salary package. Collaborate with cross-functional teams and drive technical excellence in a dynamic environment.

Benefits

25 days annual leave

Defined pension scheme

Discounted health care

Gym membership

Flexible working hours

Qualifications

• Experience in backend service development with JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience leading and mentoring software engineers.

Responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and inspire a team of engineers.
• Define technical direction and ensure alignment with business goals.
• Deliver features using agile development practices.

Skills

JavaScript

TypeScript

AWS

Event-driven microservices architecture

Job description

Job Description

This job is with BBC, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the + business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

Job Package

• 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.

If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, please contact [e-mail]. For any general queries, please contact [e-mail].

Job Introduction

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 Responsibilities

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 involves management—developing, mentoring, and inspiring engineers—and 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 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 reach their potential.
• Inspiring and motivating the team to 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 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, product, and delivery colleagues.
• Ensuring the team's technical direction and delivery align with architectural and business goals.
• Overseeing operational health of services, focusing on observability, scalability, and resilience.
• Driving best practices in monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Advocating new technologies and approaches to keep products industry-leading.
• Providing domain expertise across the wider team and beyond.
• Ensuring high standards of engineering excellence within our products.

Delivery:

• Working with cross-discipline partners to plan and commit to quarterly deliverables.
• Collaborating with stakeholders to align with organisational goals.
• Delivering features using agile development practices.
• Seeking out new tools and methodologies to improve development processes.

Are you the right candidate?

You should have experience in some of the following:

• Backend service development in JavaScript/TypeScript with Node.js
• Event-driven microservices architecture
• AWS - EC2, Lambda, S3, ECS, EKS, etc.
• Experience building, developing, leading, and mentoring software engineers

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience working in a cross-discipline environment and collaborating with stakeholders.
• Experience working within a multi-site team or department.
• Experience supporting live software systems with DevOps responsibilities.

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC and prioritizes these applications. We value diversity and are committed to equality of opportunity. We welcome applications from individuals regardless of background, belief, or socio-economic status. Flexible working requests are considered unless operational requirements prevent it.

To learn more about working at the BBC and our values, please click here.

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