Software Engineering Team Lead

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Sector: Technology
Role: Manager
Contract Type: Permanent
Hours: Full Time

Package description
Job Requisition: 23017
Band: D
Salary range: Up to £90,000 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: Salford - Dock House. Hybrid - 1 day per week in office (currently Thursday, subject to change).

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.

If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process please contact reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk. For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk.

Job Introduction

What are the Children's Apps & Games?
The BBC Children's mobile apps and games offer young children a fun, educational, and secure digital space. These apps include a range of interactive games, videos, and activities that promote early learning and development. Featuring beloved characters from popular CBeebies and CBBC shows, children can explore various topics while engaging in creative play. The apps are designed to be age-appropriate and are regularly updated with new content to keep young minds entertained and stimulated.

Our mobile app portfolio includes:

1. Playtime Island - A playful hub for games and exploration.
2. CBeebies Learn - Focused on early years learning and school readiness.
3. Get Creative - Inspires imagination through drawing, music and storytelling.
4. Storytime - Interactive tales that support literacy and emotional development.

We're transforming our children's apps and games to make them more engaging and relevant for the future. By joining our team, you will have the chance to make a significant impact in leading our mission to reinvent the BBC's digital offerings for the next generation.

Our agile team is made up of software engineers, testers, user experience designers, product owners and delivery managers, all striving to create extraordinary experiences for our young audiences.

Learning, developing and sparking curiosity is part of our culture, so you will be joining a team who really care about you, the development of your technical and leadership skills, your career aspirations and your contribution to our great team culture.

How we work

At the BBC, we build our products following Continuous Delivery practices, with a strong focus on modern development frameworks. Our builds run with fully automated pipelines, deploying to live environments on a regular basis.

We create fully responsive web solutions across multiple devices and develop the back-end services that support them. Our services are highly available and scalable, so we follow service-oriented and micro-service architectural patterns.

We adhere to agile development methodologies, practicing Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, and advocating paired programming.

Collaboration is key for us, and we often work closely with other teams within the BBC and external companies to enhance our capabilities.

Interview Process

This role would require a virtual 2hr interview which will be made up of:

1. A 55min technical presentation and discussion.
2. A 10 min break.
3. A 55min competency based interview around leadership and management.

The interview will be led by the Engineering Manager looking to hire.

In the event that we feel you may be suitable for different Software Engineering Lead role here at the BBC, we may invite you back to a shorter focused discussion regarding that particular role with the hiring manager for that team.

Main responsibilities

As Software Engineering Team Lead, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the BBC's children's app experiences. You'll lead the engineering behind high-impact products used by millions of young users each month.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Lead a cross-functional team, providing clear technical direction across our children's mobile portfolio.
2. Mentor and grow software engineers of all experience levels, from early career to principal.
3. Balance priorities across multiple product streams, ensuring focus, clarity and high standards.
4. Drive innovation by continuously enhancing our technical capabilities and learning new technologies.
5. Collaborate closely with Product, Delivery and Design to shape the backlog and deliver excellent user experiences.
6. Champion alignment across Children's & Education engineering teams, solving common challenges and influencing technical strategy.

Are you the right candidate?

You're a skilled technical leader who thrives on collaboration, continuous improvement, and building inclusive, high-performing teams. You bring a passion for developing great products and people alike, and you're just as comfortable discussing architecture and system design as you are coaching and mentoring junior engineers.

You take pride in delivering quality software, love to experiment with new technologies, and care deeply about user needs-especially when building experiences for young audiences. You lead with empathy, clarity and purpose, and you foster a culture of trust, accountability and learning.

Requirements

1. Proven experience leading software development teams.
2. Strong technical skills in React, TypeScript, and Node.js.
3. Experience building and maintaining RESTful APIs.
4. Experience developing mobile applications.
5. Understanding of mobile UI/UX design principles.
6. Confident with Git and version control workflows.
7. Strong communicator and natural collaborator.
8. A passion for mentoring and growing talent.

Desirable

1. Familiarity with mobile web frameworks (e.g., React Native, Capacitor).
2. Experience with native iOS/Android development.
3. Familiarity with app store submission processes (Apple & Google).
4. Experience using TDD, CI/CD practices, and agile methodologies.

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.

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