Senior Principal Engineer, Data Platform

Job Package

Location: Hybrid London

Department: Data Engineering
Reports To: Head of Data Engineering

Salary:

Job Introduction

The BBC is building the foundation of its enterprise-wide data capability and were seeking a Senior Principal Data Engineer to lead the technical vision strategy and execution of our data infrastructure and platform. This role is pivotal in shaping the BBCs data futureensuring scalability reliability and innovation across our data products services and internal marketplace.

Youll work alongside Data Engineering Managers driving engineering excellence fostering best practices and enabling teams to deliver high-impact data solutions at scale. Your leadership will directly influence how the BBC maximizes data value empowers teams and achieves operational maturity.

Main Responsibilitis

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define and evangelize architectural vision ensuring alignment with organizational goals and cloud-native principles.
• Offer expert guidance on large-scale data processing infrastructure patterns and operational resilience to establish best practices.
• Lead evaluations of emerging technologies (e.g. streaming IaC observability tools) and advocate for adoption where they solve critical business needs.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Act as a bridge between Data Engineering Architecture Product and Operations teams to ensure seamless integration of data solutions.
• Champion a culture of engineering excellence by mentoring teams conducting design reviews and promoting standards in code quality testing and automation.
• Collaborate with data teams to define SLAs data contracts and disaster recovery strategies to instill trust in data products.

Delivery & Scalability

• Oversee the development of modular scalable data infrastructure that supports diverse use cases from real-time analytics to batch processing.
• Drive initiatives to improve platform performance cost efficiency and reliabilitymeasured through metrics like MTTR deployment velocity and incident reduction.
• Ensure robust metadata management lineage tracking and governance practices are embedded in all data products.

Qualifications

• 10 years in data engineering with expertise in distributed systems cloud platforms and modern data stacks.
• Proven track record of designing and operationalizing large-scale data platforms serving enterprise-wide consumers.
• Deep knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) CI/CD observability tools and SRE principles.
• Strong leadership in technical mentorship cross-team collaboration and stakeholder management.

Experience with data mesh data fabric and data marketplace concepts are a plus.

Are you the right candidate

This is a rare opportunity to shape the data foundation of one of the worlds most trusted media organizations. Youll work alongside top-tier SMEs influence the future of data-driven storytelling and see your solutions impact millions of users.

We offer flexible working a culture of continuous learning and the chance to build something enduring.

Apply now or share with your network! #DataEngineering #Hiring #BBCJobs

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 dont 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 youve read about our values and behaviourshere.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individuals 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 thats 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 clickhere.