Junior Software Engineer

We are a team, sitting within the BBC’s broader Digital Publishing group, who develop and maintain two main products: One is a content management system providing for the needs of 300 digital products outside the News/Sport domain, including BBC Bitesize; the other is a system for gathering content that people in the audience send to the BBC – “User-generated content” – where the content flowing through our system may be anything between entries for competitions and eyewitness video for newsgathering.

You will find we are a motivated, flexible, pragmatic and inclusive team in which you will be able to learn and practice new skills as part of your everyday work, with the assistance and mentorship of several experienced engineers. We use remote/flexible/hybrid working practices in a way which facilitates a healthy work-life-balance for our people.

The BBC offers an inclusive workplace where the principles of fairness, respect, equality, dignity and autonomy are promoted and are part of our everyday goals and behaviour. We select candidates for our positions on the basis of merit and as an equal opportunity employer we value diversity and all of the benefits it brings.

We want the BBC to be as renowned for the quality of its engineering as it is for the quality of its content. We aspire to be the best so that we can engineer outstanding digital products, at scale. Working here in an engineering role means being part of a world-class team and a chance to do the most meaningful work of your career.

Technologies we use most heavily include:

• Java and Spring Boot
• Python
• PostgreSQL
• Amazon EC2, Lambda, S3, Cloudwatch
• (We have some Node services and use Javascript etc for front-end work. This role is primarily for back-end development)

Our practices:

• Kanban
• Continuous integration/deployment
• Automated unit- and integration testing
• Working with people with other skills in an interdisciplinary team (front- and back-end developers, product specialists, project managers, user-experience designers)
• Working with the stakeholders who use our software
• We use Jira to track & manage features and bug reports, and Confluence to provide documentation to our users
• “10% time” – one day per fortnight kept free of other work so you can focus on side projects, learning, or innovation

• Write code to implement features, remedy faults, improve our software
• Collaborate with other developers through pairing & code review
• Devops-style second-line support of software we have developed
• Participate in planning sessions, retrospectives, demos

For a junior position, we don’t expect you to already know anything, and will provide for you to learn in the course of work and in additional courses as required, but we would like you to have had experience of:

• Java
• Unit testing & test-driven development
• Code review & other code-quality practices
• Collaborating remotely by a variety of means (eg. task tickets, Slack, video conferencing)

We don’t 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 you’ve read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's 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 that’s 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 click here

Band: C
Contract type: Permanent
Location: London

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits- We offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.