Software Engineering Team Lead

JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time
DEPARTMENT: BBC Studios - Product
LOCATION: London – Hybrid
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £76,000 - £85,000 plus London weighting allowance of £5,441 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

WE ARE BBC STUDIOS

A globally renowned media company borne of the BBC. We make and distribute the world’s most sought-after TV, audio and digital content.

Our ambition is to be the home of the most powerful, entertaining, and inspiring stories for people all around the world.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

You will be the technical leader of an empowered engineering team, combining world class engineering excellence with a customer centric mindset. As a hands on Tech Lead, you will set technical direction, coach engineers, and partner with Product and Design to ship meaningful outcomes at high speed and quality.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

This role sits within the bbc.com worldwide team, focused on delivering solutions and content for our global (non-UK) audience. The platform is supported by three teams: front-end, CMS/tooling, and back-end systems. We're currently undergoing a transformation to strengthen our agile and engineering practices, with a constant drive to improve. The team is known for being friendly, open, and supportive. bbc.com is part of the wider Studios Product Group, which manages major BBC brands and content distribution.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT:

Technical Vision & Architecture

• Own the architectural roadmap, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, and secure-consistent with leading industry production standards.
• Evaluate build vs buy decisions and introduce proven patterns (Microservices, event streaming, service meshes) where they create real
  product leverage.

Product & Customer Focus

• Collaborate with Product Management to translate problems into measurable outcomes, prioritising impact over output.
• Instrument features for data driven iteration; ensure we learn from every release.

Team Leadership & Coaching

• Mentor and sponsor engineers, fostering a learning culture inspired by modern engineering bootcamp principles.
• Lead design reviews, pair programming, and blameless retros, championing psychological safety and continuous improvement.

Engineering Execution

• Drive best in class operational excellence: automated testing, CI/CD, canary releases, and proactive observability.
• Eliminate toil through automation and rigorous Developer Experience (DevEx) standards.

Cross Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Data, Security, and SRE to align on shared goals and guardrails.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to executives and non technical stakeholders.

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:

• A strong track record of managing and leading teams. Driving complex projects from concept to completion.
• Proven success shipping user facing products or platforms with significant reach and reliability requirements.
• Strong technical Expertise using TypeScript
• Good understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure),and database technologies (SQL & NoSQL).
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy aligned to business outcomes.

DESIRED BUT NOT REQUIRED:

• Familiarity with SVPG principles and empowered product teams.
• Experience using Go, Java, Kotlin, Python

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.

NEXT STEPS

We appreciate your interest in this position and understand how important this opportunity is to you. Due to the high volume of interest we may need to close the application period earlier than anticipated. This step is necessary to ensure we can provide a high level of attention and service to all applicants. Thank you for your understanding.

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.

#BBCSTUDIOS

Disclaimer

This 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.

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.