Head of Architecture (Data Platform and Account and Identity)
Job Details
Job Band: F
Contract Type: Permanent, Full-Time
Department: Product Engineering
Location: Flexible (any major UK BBC hub) with hybrid working
Proposed Salary Range: up to £150,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.
Purpose of the Role
The BBC’s Product Engineering function is looking to appoint two Heads of Architecture to join BBC Product Group’s architecture leadership team. The architecture team’s mission is to drive the technical designs and approaches that allow the BBC’s audience‑facing digital products to rapidly grow and innovate in an efficient and scalable way.
The role advertised here is the Head of Architecture focused on Data Platform and Account and Identity. A second vacancy for a Head of Architecture focused on Enablement is also being advertised. Please apply individually for the role(s) which interest you.
Why Join the Team
This is a chance to work at scale, to tackle complex architectural challenges, and to influence the journey from traditional broadcasting to a fully connected, on‑demand future. You’ll join a supportive community of architects – working across disciplines to bring clarity, coherence, and innovation to everything we do.
Your Key Responsibilities and Impact
As Head of Architecture, you will define and support the delivery of the technical architecture in your area of responsibility. This includes both line management and setting overall strategy in a way that enables all engineering teams to work at scale and high efficiency.
This is a highly collaborative role. You will work closely with a wide range of engineering, product, and business leaders, and with multi‑disciplinary teams across the organisation. You will use your communication and influencing skills to explain how your technical strategy contributes to wider business objectives, backed up by a coherent approach for delivering the strategy. In this role you will be one of the most senior technologists at the BBC. You will play a critical role in the organisation’s digital transformation.
Your key day‑to‑day responsibilities will include:
* Being part of the Product Group Engineering Leadership team, helping to drive the overall technology strategy with your peers.
* Being part of one or multiple cross‑discipline leadership teams, collaborating with Engineering, Product, Delivery, Data, UX, and other disciplines to develop successful products that grow the BBC’s online reach.
* Line managing, coaching and developing a team of talented architects, as well as supporting a wide range of engineering and product teams.
* Owning the technology landscape within your area, identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement, and taking accountability for ensuring solutions are performant and sustainable.
* Playing a critical role in defining how to enable our platform strategy and engineering efficiency through capabilities that apply at all levels of our technical stack.
Area of Responsibility
In this role you will join three other Heads of Architecture to collectively own the architecture strategy and technical direction of the BBC’s online products. Together this architecture leadership – which is part of the engineering leadership – must ensure architectural alignment across all teams. Within this role, your focus will be on the BBC’s Data Platform and Account & Identity capabilities, which underpin both digital and broadcast experiences at national and global scale. These platforms enable audience insight, personalisation, operational decision‑making and regulatory compliance, forming a critical part of the BBC’s future technology landscape.
As Head of Architecture for Data Platform & Account & Identity, your responsibilities will include:
* Creating and evolving platform capabilities that support billions of audience events per day, enabling high‑availability, secure and scalable systems with near‑zero tolerance for failure. This includes data ingestion, processing, and analytics platforms, alongside identity and authentication services used by millions of users globally.
* Leading the transition from vertically aligned systems to domain‑oriented, platform‑based architectures. This includes embedding data product thinking, clear ownership models, discoverability and governance, and supporting the maturity of operating models across platform and product teams.
* Defining and governing architectural standards across data, AI/ML and identity ecosystems. This includes ensuring coherence across real‑time and batch processing, machine learning enablement platforms, and customer identity services, while maintaining regulatory compliance, managing risk, and ensuring long‑term technical sustainability.
* Establishing architectural approaches that enable responsible AI and ML at scale, balancing innovation and experimentation with appropriate governance and safety.
* Providing architectural leadership for major technology decisions, including platform strategy, vendor selection and investment prioritisation, with clear accountability for enterprise‑level outcomes and trade‑offs.
* Leading, coaching and developing a senior architecture team, and contributing to the wider engineering and product leadership community to strengthen architectural practices, culture and capability across the organisation.
As with similar leadership roles, your areas of focus are likely to evolve over time to support new programmes of work and organisational priorities.
Your Skills and Experience
The ideal candidate will evidence the following skills and experience:
* Significant experience as a technical architect (or similar role), including defining and delivering a technical vision and strategy, and designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable architectures.
* Proven digital leader, with gravitas to work effectively with senior colleagues as well as being able to inspire, motivate and drive change through a large engineering team.
* Ability to present to and influence C‑Level colleagues, creating great interpersonal relationships across the organisation.
* A team player who can coach, develop and mentor others in our engineering community, and provide leadership amongst your peers.
* Significant experience leading in a software development environment, including agile delivery at scale, and with an informed view of architectural and engineering best‑practice.
* Knowledge of a broad range of technology concepts such as cloud computing (e.g. AWS), micro‑service architectures, event‑driven architectures and data processing at scale.
* Approaches to standardisation and governance, such as to manage efficiency, security and legal compliance, in a way that balances standardisation with autonomy at scale.
* Strong organisational skills that enable you to work across multiple specialist teams to align architecture goals and drive change and adoption.
* Continued professional development both as a leader and technologist, including a deep understanding of industry trends (e.g. AI). You will be expected to proactively identify and leverage these trends to drive innovation. This includes staying ahead of emerging technologies, assessing their potential impact, and integrating relevant advancements into our architecture strategy to ensure we remain at the forefront of digital transformation.
Being a leader at the BBC means putting the organisation’s interest, goals and values first, ahead of individual team or function needs. The characteristics of an enterprise leader are: Focuses on outcomes over activity, adapts quickly, and simplifies complexity. They balance short‑term actions with long‑term impact, take full accountability for actions and decision‑making, and prioritise capability development to create teams fit for the future.
If you can bring some of these skills and experiences, 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.
Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Recruitment 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.
For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk
Redeployment
The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC and they will be given priority consideration ahead of the 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.
Information at a Glance
This is your BBC
At the BBC you can create and innovate in an inclusive environment while contributing to some of the world’s best loved content, and the BBC’s mission to inform, educate and entertain.
Life at BBC
Here you will benefit from:
* Fair pay and flexible benefits including a competitive salary package, a flexible 35‑hour working week, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pensionscheme and discounted dental, health care and gym.
* Excellent career and professional development.
* Support in your working life, including flexible working which you can discuss with us at any point during the application, selection or offer.
* A values‑based organisation where the way we do things is important as what we do.
Benefits may vary if you are joining on an FTC basis or on an orchestra conditions contract.
Learn more about life at the BBC and our values in our candidate pack.
You belong
We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual’s unique contribution, so all our employees feel that they can belong, thrive and achieve their full potential.
We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to join us. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.
We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio‑economic background, religion and/or belief.
Find out more about diversity, inclusion and belonging in our strategy below.
Disability confident
We are a disability confident employer. If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, or to carry out this role, please contact us via email and we’d be happy to discuss: reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk
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