Software Engineer (Team Leader)

THIS JOB HAS NOW EXPIRED.

As a Software Engineering Team Leader with a proven track record of designing complex, maintainable and well-documented applications coupled with significant experience of leading teams of software engineers in an agile environment, you will be in your element in our Internet Research and Future Services group, part of our world-class BBC Research & Development (R&D) department.

The Internet Research and Future Services builds prototypes, develops original research and solves problems. We work across most digital platforms and all BBC services by combining emerging technologies with anticipated user needs to develop applied research. We believe that the best way to think about ideas and problems is to create things and develop concrete examples - we do this to learn, influence and shape.

Our work has a particular focus on the internet and on user experiences. Right now, for instance, we’re particularly interested in discovery of content within large collections, personalisation and identity on the web, innovative user interfaces and reminders/bookmarks on connected TVs and radios, but new challenges are always emerging.

Internet Research and Future Services is a multi-disciplinary team within R&D department. As the leader of a small team of software engineers you will manage the technical development of a variety of different projects. As an example you would be responsible for the technical design and development of both client-facing and backend features that enhance and extend the BBC Snippets project which enables search within a large archive of BBC content.

You will be expected to:

• Lead a team of three software engineers, review their work and provide mentoring and assistance as required
• Design, develop, test, release and document complex systems using software engineering best practices to ensure timely service delivery and ease of maintenance
• Work with colleagues and institutions across the BBC and outside to develop new features and functionality
• Translate requirements into clear, achievable technical goals
• Provide time and resource estimates to assist in the planning of projects
• Provide technical advice to the editorial and design teams on new application concepts and to establish their feasibility
• Write maintainable, reliable and well-documented code
• Incorporate new machine-learning based approaches with a particular emphasis on content retrieval and indexing
• Collaborate effectively with R&D colleagues to exploit new technologies to enhance applications and service infrastructure
• Understand existing systems and how to enhance them with new features
• Keep abreast of and contribute to developments in software engineering, machine learning, open source and related technologies
• Develop tools and methodologies to improve the effectiveness of the development process

Knowledge, experience and skills

Essential

• Proven track record of designing complex, maintainable and well-documented applications using a combination of web frontends, service-oriented architecture and background processing
• Proven track record of establishing and developing best practices in a production setting, in particular the use of source control, well-defined deployment practices, testing, quality assurance, issue management, monitoring and capacity planning
• Highly skilled and competent in the craft of creating software
• Significant experience of leading teams of software engineers in an agile environment
• Technical expertise in transcoding a variety of audio/video formats
• Enthusiastic supporter and user of open source technologies

Desirable

• Experience with GNU/Linux systems administration, C/C++, Redis, Resque, FFmpeg, Scala, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, message queue architectures, git
• Knowledge of speech recognition techniques, audio analysis and classifier systems
• Experience of television and radio technologies
• Experience of contributing to open source projects
• Knowledge of Solr and other open-source search platforms

Additional Information

• This role is a salaried (not a day rate contract) fixed term contract role.

• Please upload your CV as well as providing any links to any open-source projects that you have worked on.
• Please also address in detail the requirements of the role by writing a comprehensive answer to the application question on our careers site. Your application will not be considered without a detailed and tailored answer.

Closing date: 5 August 2012.