Principal Software Engineer

JOB DETAILS

JOB BAND: D

CONTRACT TYPE:
Permanent

DEPARTMENT: BBC Product Group – Data Platforms

LOCATION:

Newcastle - Hybrid

PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £65,000 - £80,000 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.

Join the BBC’s Data Sourcing teams and help shape the future of our streaming and analytics platforms. As a Principal Software Engineer, you’ll provide technical leadership across critical ingestion and real‑time data systems, helping teams deliver scalable, resilient, and high‑performing platforms that enable data‑driven decision making across the BBC.

Data Sourcing sits at the heart of how the BBC understands and serves its audiences across News, Sport, TV, and Radio. You’ll work with modern cloud and streaming technologies, help shape the evolution of our real‑time data ecosystem, and play a key role in growing the BBC’s engineering culture within the Newcastle Tech Hub.

• Provide technical leadership across streaming, ingestion, and analytics platforms used across the BBC.
• Drive engineering standards, architectural direction, and platform evolution across multiple teams.
• Support the continued evolution of the BBC’s real‑time streaming and data platforms, helping improve scalability, resilience, and operational maturity.
• Work closely with other Principal Engineers and technical leaders to maintain high engineering standards and support consistent technical practices across teams.
• Help teams design and deliver scalable cloud‑based services and data pipelines across a range of technologies and engineering domains.
• Mentor and support engineers at all levels, helping grow technical capability, engineering culture, and modern software development practices.
• Work closely with engineering, product, and platform stakeholders to solve complex technical challenges and enable effective delivery.

• Strong experience designing and operating large‑scale distributed or event‑driven systems.
• Hands‑on experience with streaming and data technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Spark, or similar platforms.
• Experience building scalable cloud‑based services, ideally within AWS environments and modern backend technologies such as Java/Spring Boot or Type Script.
• Ability to lead technical decision‑making and influence engineering direction across teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with experience mentoring engineers and working across multidisciplinary teams.

• Experience working with real‑time analytics or large‑scale data ingestion platforms.
• Experience working across a broad range of technologies, platforms, and engineering domains within multi‑team environments.
• Familiarity with observability, operational monitoring, CI/CD, and platform reliability practices.
• Experience with data technologies such as Airflow, Redshift, Dynamo
  
  DB, Mongo
  
  DB, or similar tooling.
• Interest in contributing to engineering culture, standards, and the wider technology community.

Our teams work across a broad range of technologies and platforms. While this role will primarily support our real‑time streaming and ingestion platforms, our Principal Engineers collaborate across multiple teams and engineering domains.

• Java / Spring Boot and Type Script / Java Script
• AWS services including MSK, Lambda, ECS, S3, Dynamo
  
  DB, Redshift, and SQS
• Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Airflow, Spark, and Event Bridge
• SQL and No
  
  SQL databases including Postgres, Mongo
  
  DB, Dynamo
  
  DB, and Timestream
• CI/CD and automation tooling including Git Hub Actions, Jenkins, and Code Pipeline
• Observability and visualisation tooling including Grafana and Tableau

Our wider engineering ecosystem also includes web and mobile technologies, including Type Script/JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin,…