BBC

JOB DETAILS

BAND: E

DEPARTMENT: Product Engineering & Data, Enablement Dev Operations

SALARY: £110,000-£119,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-Time

LOCATION: Newcastle or Salford - Hybrid

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.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

The BBC Dev Operations function is looking to appoint a Software Engineering Manager to play a key leadership role responsible for driving automation, platform reliability, operational visibility, and security across the BBC Product Group.

This new role will establish a multidisciplinary team supporting platforms and federated engineering teams, ensuring that digital products are robust, scalable, and cost-effective. By building and maintaining automation, observability, and CI/CD pipelines, and by championing best practices in reliability engineering, the team enables faster, safer software delivery and rapid incident response.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT

• Lead and Develop a High-Performing DevOps Engineers – recruit and manage a multidisciplinary team responsible for Automation, Observability/Monitoring, Security & Compliance Automation, CI/CD Pipeline, Reliability/Resilience, FinOps, Root Cause/Incident Response, Dashboarding/Reporting and 24/7 Runbook & On-Call Coordinators.
• Drive Platform Automation and Operational Excellence - own and evolve automation strategies, tooling, and processes that increase deployment velocity, reliability, and consistency across centralised and federated engineering teams.
• Champion Reliability Engineering and Incident Response - build and embed best practices in site reliability engineering, including proactive monitoring, incident detection, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement to minimise downtime and user impact.
• Enhance Observability and Operational Visibility - oversee the design, implementation, and evolution of monitoring, alerting, dashboarding, and reporting capabilities that provide actionable insights and enable rapid response to issues.
• Embed Security, Compliance, and Cost Management - ensure security and compliance are integral to all DevOps practices. Collaborate with relevant teams to automate compliance checks and manage cloud/platform costs effectively through FinOps practices.
• Drive Collaboration Across Engineering Teams - work closely with both platform teams and product teams to support diverse delivery models, promote knowledge sharing, and ensure alignment on reliability and operational standards.
• Support 24/7 Runbook and On-Call Operations - oversee the creation and maintenance of runbooks and on-call processes, ensuring robust support for live services and effective handover between teams.
• Contribute to Strategic SRE Evolution - play a key role in shaping the long-term approach to SRE within the BBC Product Group, including the potential organisational design and the evolution of team structure and responsibilities.
• Promote a Culture of Continuous Improvement - foster an environment of learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement, championing automation, resilience, and operational excellence at scale.

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Proven experience leading DevOps and/or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams in large-scale, complex digital or technology environments.
• Deep expertise in automation, CI/CD pipeline design and operation, and modern infrastructure management (cloud-native, containerisation, infrastructure-as-code).
• Strong background in implementing and evolving observability, monitoring, and incident response practices to drive high reliability and rapid recovery.
• Demonstrated experience embedding security and compliance controls into DevOps workflows and managing platform or cloud costs (FinOps).
• Track record of collaborating across centralised and federated teams, bridging technical and non-technical stakeholders to deliver shared operational goals.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills, including mentoring multidisciplinary engineering teams and driving cultural change.