Senior Principal Engineer, Data Platform

Senior Principal Engineer, Data Platform Press Tab to Move to Skip to Content Link

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Language Log in to Profile BBC Employee Login Job Description CREATE JOB ALERT Job Title: Senior Principal Engineer, Data Platform Senior Principal Engineer, Data Platform London - London Broadcasting House Job Closing Date: THE ROLE Job Package

Location: Hybrid, London

Department: Data Engineering
Reports To: Head of Data Engineering

Salary: £92,000-£102,000

Job Introduction

The BBC is building the foundation of its enterprise-wide data capability, and we're seeking a Senior Principal Data Engineer to lead the technical vision, strategy, and execution of our data infrastructure and platform. This role is pivotal in shaping the BBC's data future-ensuring scalability, reliability, and innovation across our data products, services, and internal marketplace.

You'll work alongside Data Engineering Managers, driving engineering excellence, fostering best practices, and enabling teams to deliver high-impact data solutions at scale. Your leadership will directly influence how the BBC maximizes data value, empowers teams, and achieves operational maturity.

Main Responsibilitis

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define and evangelize architectural vision, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and cloud-native principles.
• Offer expert guidance on large-scale data processing, infrastructure patterns, and operational resilience to establish best practices.
• Lead evaluations of emerging technologies (e.g., streaming, IaC, observability tools) and advocate for adoption where they solve critical business needs.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Act as a bridge between Data Engineering, Architecture, Product, and Operations teams to ensure seamless integration of data solutions.
• Champion a culture of engineering excellence by mentoring teams, conducting design reviews, and promoting standards in code quality, testing, and automation.
• Collaborate with data teams to define SLAs, data contracts, and disaster recovery strategies to instill trust in data products.

Delivery & Scalability

• Oversee the development of modular, scalable data infrastructure that supports diverse use cases, from real-time analytics to batch processing.
• Drive initiatives to improve platform performance, cost efficiency, and reliability-measured through metrics like MTTR, deployment velocity, and incident reduction.
• Ensure robust metadata management, lineage tracking, and governance practices are embedded in all data products.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, with expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms, and modern data stacks.
• Proven track record of designing and operationalizing large-scale data platforms serving enterprise-wide consumers.
• Deep knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD, observability tools, and SRE principles.
• Strong leadership in technical mentorship, cross-team collaboration, and stakeholder management.

Experience with data mesh, data fabric and data marketplace concepts are a plus.

Are you the right candidate?

This is a rare opportunity to shape the data foundation of one of the world's most trusted media organizations. You'll work alongside top-tier SMEs, influence the future of data-driven storytelling, and see your solutions impact millions of users.

We offer flexible working, a culture of continuous learning, and the chance to build something enduring.

Apply now or share with your network!

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

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 behaviourshere .

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 clickhere .

DISCLAIMER

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.

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