Junior Software Engineer

JOB DETAILS

JOB BAND: C

CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time

DEPARTMENT: Digital Distribution

LOCATION: London – Hybrid

PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £32, 200 - £44, 200

depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

Media Distribution Analytics is the team that knows what your streaming experience was while watching Wimbledon on iPlayer or listening to your favourite podcast on BBC Sounds. The BBC’s future is dependent on delivering content to an ever-growing online audience and setting the industry standard for a world-class on-demand and live streaming experience. That means playing content back flawlessly and offering the best quality media to our audience, so that we continue to deliver news, entertainment and the UK's most prestigious live events that delight our audiences.

To achieve these goals the Media Distribution Analytics team develop the data products and pipelines that ingest, measure and visualise the audience experience and allow us to take action, often in real-time, in addition to informing long term capacity requirements and performance. This is a data engineering team that processes enormous quantities of data, and works closely with device playback and the BBC’s own Content Distribution Network team (BIDI), as well as third party network suppliers, to help make the online streaming experience the best it can possibly be.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

Joining the Media Distribution Analytics team as a junior software engineer is a chance to work on high-impact, real-time data systems that improve how millions experience BBC content. You’ll collaborate with experienced engineers, learn to build scalable data pipelines, and contribute to cutting-edge streaming analytics. a unique opportunity to grow your skills while shaping the future of online media distribution at the BBC.

Your Key Responsibilities And Impact

• Design and build data products to understand media distribution within the BBC.
• Maintain and extend a petabyte-scale data lake and ETL process.
• Develop our real-time stream processing pipeline used for operational monitoring.
• Collaborate with stakeholders and engineers to find new requirements, ensure products are impactful and add value.
• Contribute to culture of engineering excellence
  
  

Essential Criteria

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• You’re enthusiastic about working with data and excited to learn how data products shape user experiences.
• Ability to write code in at least one programming language commonly used in data engineering—such as Python, SQL, or Java—and are open to learning others
• Understanding of the fundamentals of databases—whether relational, object storage, or data warehouses—and are curious to explore modern data lake and data modelling tools
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code concepts and are eager to learn how to deploy and manage data services in production
• Enjoying collaborating in cross-functional teams and being comfortable asking questions, seeking feedback, and learning from others
  
  

Desired But Not Required

• Some hands-on experience (through work, university, or personal projects) with batch or streaming data pipelines and are keen to deepen your knowledge of tools like Spark, Kafka, or Flink.
• Familiarity with cloud services (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• You're interested in building reliable systems and are willing to develop your skills in testing, version control, CI/CD, and working in production environments.
• Exposure to data visualization tools (such as Looker, Grafana, or PowerBI) is a plus, but a willingness to learn how to communicate insights from data is even more important.
  
  

If you can bring some of these skills and experience, along with transferable strengths, we’d love to hear from you and encourage you to apply.

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.

For any general queries, please contact: [email protected]

Redeployment

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.