Lead Data Engineer - GenAI

JOB DETAILS

JOB BAND: E
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time  
DEPARTMENT: BBC Group Strategy and Transformation
LOCATION: Salford
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £80,000 - £90,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

The Lead Data Engineer will help the BBC make practical use of AI tools and systems to solve business problems and help our internal teams work effectively and efficiently. 

The role is in the BBC’s Generative AI Programme and will collaborate closely with project managers, data scientists, analysts, domain experts, and the BBC's technical teams. Working with Programme Leadership, the postholder will design and help build the data pipelines and solutions that enable AI projects to move effectively through piloting to successful handover to the business for scaling.  

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

The Generative AI Programme, part of the Strategy & Transformation team, helps the BBC realise value from rapidly evolving AI capabilities in a way that is practical, responsible and aligned to the BBC’s public service mission. The team’s activities include enabling adoption of AI tools across the organisation; fostering innovation; finding opportunities to use AI to work more efficiently as an organisation, and leading the BBC's engagement on the wider AI issues that shape our operating environment.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT 

• Develop secure, reliable and well-designed solutions that support high-quality AI piloting and transition to successful handover to the business for scaling. 
• Design and build robust data pipelines, models and supporting data structures that enable AI projects to move effectively from piloting to successful handover into the business for scaling. 
• Work closely with data scientists, analysts, project managers, business partners, researchers and designers to understand requirements and translate them into valuable solutions. 
• Establish and promote strong engineering practices for data quality, resilience, maintainability and operational performance across the team’s work. 
• Help shape data approaches to architecture, integration and pilot design, ensuring solutions are appropriate for AI experimentation and future scaling. 
• Provide technical leadership to others, mentoring, code review and setting standards, contributing to a culture of learning and continuous improvement. 
• Ensure data used within AI projects is managed in line with the BBC’s organisational values, security requirements and responsible approach to AI. 

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Essential criteria 

• Significant experience of designing, delivering and operating data engineering solutions, including pipelines, models and platform components, with the engineering discipline to build secure, resilient and maintainable systems in complex organisational environments. 
• Experience of working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams, translating a range of user, product and research needs into practical engineering solutions. 
• Demonstrable experience of providing technical leadership to other engineers, mentoring, reviewing code, setting standards and improving engineering practices. 
• Sound understanding of data governance, security and quality considerations, with the judgement to apply these appropriately in innovative or experimental contexts. 
• Strong engineering practices including security by design, proficiency in Python, experience with Cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred), CI/CD pipelines, and demonstrable use of AI-assisted development tools to improve code quality and delivery pace. 

Desirable criteria 

• Experience working in broadcast, media, start-up or research environments. 
• Contributions to published technical documents or thought leadership in your area of expertise. 
• Familiarity with API development frameworks (FastAPI or equivalent). 
• Experience building with Generative AI frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI) and managed AI services (e.g. Bedrock, Azure).