Senior Data Engineer - GenAI

JOB DETAILS

JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time  
DEPARTMENT: BBC Group Strategy and Transformation
LOCATION: Salford
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £60,000 - £70,000 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 Senior 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. The Senior Data Engineer will help build and support reliable data pipelines and components that enable AI projects to move effectively from piloting to successful handover to the business for scaling. The role will work in ways that are responsible, evidence-led and aligned with the BBC’s values.  

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 

• Help evaluate AI and automation capabilities, both existing and emerging, using data and evidence to inform decisions about the most appropriate solutions for BBC contexts. 
• Design and develop data pipelines, technical components and supporting capabilities that enable the evaluation and adoption of agentic and AI automation tooling. 
• Work with colleagues across the team to design AI, agentic and automation solutions that address clearly defined operational or domain-specific problems. 
• Build secure, resilient and maintainable data engineering solutions that support experimentation as well as more scalable use where appropriate. 
• Collaborate closely with domain experts, data scientists, analysts, researchers, designers and project management teams to translate requirements into valuable solutions. 
• Contribute to good engineering practice across the team, supporting high standards in data quality, governance, documentation and continuous improvement. 
• Ensure work is carried out in line with the BBC’s organisational values, security requirements and responsible approach to AI adoption. 

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Essential criteria 

• Experience of designing, delivering and operating data engineering solutions, including pipelines, integrations and piloting capabilities.  
• Experience of working with multidisciplinary teams to understand business or user problems and translate them into valuable solutions. 
• Ability to evaluate new tools or technologies critically, using evidence and sound judgement to assess their effectiveness and suitability. 
• Good understanding of data governance, security and quality considerations, with the ability to apply these appropriately in innovative or experimental settings. 
• Good 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. 
• A strong academic background or research credentials in data engineering or a related discipline. 
• Familiarity with API development frameworks (FastAPI or equivalent). 
• Experience building with Generative AI and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI) and managed AI services (e.g. Bedrock, Azure). 
• Familiarity with enterprise automation toolsets (e.g. Microsoft Power Platform, Copilot Studio) and an understanding of how they complement bespoke AI solutions in large organisations.