Overview
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £95,000 - £110,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role 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 is reimagining the data platform that powers industry reporting, north-star metrics, marketing, personalisation, business insight, digital application development, and content commissioning. We are moving towards a self-service data platform that supports analytical, machine learning, and near-real time use cases at scale. We are looking for a Lead Architect to shape this next-generation platform. You will be responsible for developing reusable capabilities that enable data teams to ingest data through ELT/ETL pipelines, transform it across our data lake and warehouse, and make it available for production workloads. The platform must support the entire data lifecycle—from early exploration to operational production—while ensuring governance, security, and repeatability. Our core environment is AWS, with Redshift at the centre, and we are consolidating towards a unified environment. Governance, data catalogue integration, and scalable pipelines are essential to this vision.
Why Join the Team
This is a critical role embedded in cross-functional teams operating within the Product Operating Model, working with engineers, product managers, data scientists, delivery managers, and security specialists. You will also collaborate with architects across the BBC to ensure coherence and alignment with wider enterprise architecture. We want the BBC to be renowned for the quality of its engineering as well as its content. This role offers the opportunity to work in a collaborative environment on systems of national scale and impact, shaping the future of data at the BBC.
Your Key Responsibilities and Impact
* Partner with Product and Engineering from discovery through delivery to ensure solutions are feasible, sustainable, and aligned with BBC's data strategy.
* Co-own architectural decisions, embedding oversight into cross-functional teams and documenting choices through ADRs.
* Provide architectural leadership across the BBC ecosystem, ensuring technical coherence, managing dependencies, and minimising complexity.
* Champion patterns, best practices, and evolutionary design approaches to deliver secure, robust, and repeatable solutions.
* Mentor and coach engineering teams, raising technical delivery standards and communicating architecture clearly to all stakeholders.
Qualifications and Experience
* Proven architecture experience designing high-volume, near-real-time data platforms with a strong focus on resilience, reliability, and security.
* Expertise in AWS (particularly Redshift), ELT/ETL pipelines, and the full end-to-end data lifecycle from exploration to production.
* Experience embedding data governance, metadata management, and catalogue tooling into platform solutions.
* Demonstrated ability to collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to deliver on architectural strategy.
* Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence, translate technical detail, and shape a compelling strategic vision.
Desirable but Not Required
* Experience enabling self-service analytical platforms and supporting use cases such as personalisation, machine learning, and advanced analytics.
* Knowledge of big data technologies and their practical application for technical and data professionals.
* Experience in agile software delivery at scale, with a perspective on what good looks like in data engineering.
* Knowledge of cloud-native and microservice architectures across multiple domains (web, mobile, data).
* Experience evaluating and advocating for emerging technologies to deliver business value.
Additional Information
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 the BBC
* 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 pension scheme 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.
Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging
We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. 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.
#J-18808-Ljbffr