Senior Architect - Media Services

JOB DETAILS

JOB DETAILS: Senior Architect - Media Services
JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time
DEPARTMENT: Digital Distribution – Media Services
LOCATION: London or Salford (preferred), or Glasgow, Cardiff, Newcastle, or Birmingham, with regular travel to London/Salford as part of hybrid working
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £75,000–£85,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience.

We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. If you wish, you can outline your preference when you apply, but there’s no obligation at this stage.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

The BBC’s ambition is to match world class content with world class engineering. Our digital products reach millions of people every day, powered by a sophisticated media platform operating at significant scale. We are seeking a Senior Architect to grow our architecture team and help shape the media platform’s evolution through a combination of strategic leadership and evidence-based solution design.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

Media Services sits at the heart of BBC Digital Distribution. Our media platform delivers the audio and video that power BBC iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport, as well as numerous BBC.com commercial products and internal workflows. Each day, we handle more than 50 million plays and process thousands of hours of content.
You will join a highly collaborative technical architecture team that works with product and engineering colleagues across all areas of the media platform, with three key aims:
- Act as a cross-cutting enabler for our teams by managing a portfolio of architecture approaches and consultancy techniques.
- Lead and maintain a cohesive Media Services architecture strategy.
- Support Media Services’ product engineering teams to shape and deliver projects that align with our strategy.
No two days are the same: our remit spans on premise broadcast infrastructure and cloud; full stack software engineering; audio and video fundamentals; file based and live media processing; strategic architecture and solution design.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT:
• Develop and maintain architecture strategies for Media Services, aligning segment level architecture with departmental and enterprise goals and working collaboratively with other architecture, product and engineering colleagues.
• Guide and deliver solution designs for media capabilities and workflows, partnering closely with engineers to ensure designs are practical, scalable and aligned with our strategic intent.
• Undertake discovery and proof of concept work, exploring architectural patterns and approaches to inform decision making and de risk complex solutions.
• Lead the architectural design of end to end workflows that integrate multiple teams and domains.
• Nurture and coach our technical community, hosting knowledge sharing and consultancy sessions to help teams continuously improve their patterns, practices and technical estate.

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:
• Experience designing distributed streaming and/or file processing workflows on AWS (our domain covers audio-visual data, but experience from other areas will also be considered)
• Experience designing architectures at a range of scales, from individual capabilities to larger segments and, occasionally, enterprise.
• Practical backend software prototyping skills to support proof of concept activities and inform technical decisions (we are primarily Java-based, but other languages are also in use).
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, including the ability to lead architectural discussions with technical and non technical stakeholders at a range of levels.
• Strong analytical, modelling and abstraction skills, with the ability to represent domains and their interfaces using appropriate tools (we frequently use PlantUML and OpenAPI)

DESIRED BUT NOT REQUIRED:
• Specific experience with audio-visual media technologies such as MP2TS, RTP, SRT, HLS, DASH, MXF, IMF, MP4
• Experience with adjacent technologies such as broadcast infrastructure (SDI, AES), media production systems and IP networking fundamentals.
• Experience building serverless media workflows using AWS Lambda, Step Functions and AWS Elemental services.
• Awareness of full stack development (we build frontend components for web, Android and iOS).
• Awareness of software platform enablers such as infrastructure as code, CI/CD, version control, monitoring and observability tools.
• Knowledge of secure design techniques such as threat modelling and zero trust.

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

Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Contracts of Employment policy. This allows us to discuss any support you may need and assess any risks. Failure to disclose may result in the withdrawal of your offer.