DevOps Systems Engineer DevOps Systems Engineer

We offer a comprehensive suite of microservices that power backend workflows, preparing, transcoding, packaging, and distributing audio and video content online. In an increasingly digital landscape, our role is pivotal in maintaining the BBC's relevance.

Our media components are central to BBC's flagship products like iPlayer, Sounds, News, and Sport. Whether you're catching up on EastEnders, listening to Radio 1, or watching live sports, our platform ensures a robust, reliable, and consistent audience experience.

The Media Services team employs cutting-edge, cloud-based technologies to publish all BBC online audio and video content, driving iPlayer, BBC Sounds, News, and Sport. We manage live streaming, catch-up content, and podcasts, handling over 13 million plays daily, ingesting and publishing thousands of hours of catch-up content, and delivering 3-4 TB of new files daily. Our goal is to deliver the best playback experiences to global audiences across various platforms and devices.

The Digital Distribution Media Services SRE team provide the core support and shared observability and alerting systems for the Media Services platform.

Our team's mission is to leverage software/systems engineering principles to enhance reliability through observability, proactive collaboration, and support by developing processes, tooling, and services.

We accelerate product teams by offering preferred systems and solutions, aiding developers in creating reliable products and services with broadcast-level reliability. Achieved through collaboration, our product stack, and best engineering practices.

Our services are vital for the performance and uptime of numerous BBC digital media services, operating across internal data centres and cloud locations.

Interview Process

Candidate will be sent 5 days prior to 1st stage interview a scenario based technical assessment to complete as homework for the interview.

• 1st stage virtual interview approx. 1 - 1.5 hours

o 1st half - competency based interview.
o 2nd half - Technical questions regarding the preprepared scenario-based coding/scripting task assigned to candidate.

• 2nd stage virtual interview - approx. 30 minutes - 1 hour and values-based questions with team lead and engineering manager.


Main Responsibilities


• You will be a passionate engineer experienced in cloud technologies.


• You will enjoy developing and supporting industry-standard tools/services that enable development to function efficiently. You will enjoy coding, testing, and managing large architectures.


• You will enjoy contributing ideas towards our roadmap, collaborating across BBC teams, and embrace learning.


• You will enjoy systems engineering challenges.


You would be responsible for:


• Responding to problems and failures openly and blamelessly, viewing them as opportunities for improvement.


• Automating tasks to reduce repetitive work (toil).


• Advocating DevOps/SRE principles for cloud and on-prem systems, prioritising reliability, and observability.


• Assisting product teams with metrics visualisation, logging, release tooling, automation, secrets storage, SLI/SLO and error budgeting to enhance internal and audience-facing systems.


• Ensuring that the system can handle tomorrow's load more effectively than today.


• Developing code for easy maintenance, support, and risk reduction.


• Consulting with product owners and development teams to support their objectives.


• Participation of in-hours and out of hours on-call support to the Media Services estate.
  
  Participation of in-hours and out of hours on-call support to the media services estate.


• Support and develop the tools that provide our capabilities to monitor, log, alert and visualise data.


• Demonstrable experience in one of the following scripting languages. (Python, Bash, Go, Ruby)


• Demonstrable experience developing cloud-based infrastructure; ideally AWS cloud services.


• Experience in automating and reducing TOIL.


• Demonstrable experience with modern CI/CD tools and best practices.


• Demonstrable experience with Linux operating systems, primarily Redhat Linux and similar (CentOS, Rocky, Amazon Linux).


• Demonstrable experience of applying systems and software engineering principles in solving operational problems.


• Strong communicator with a collaborative mindset, adept at working within a team environment.


• Understanding complex technical problems including contributing to blameless post incident reviews.


• Demonstrable experience working in an Agile development environment.


Desirable


• Knowledge of Media and broadcast technology development principles


• Awareness for the need of SLI/SLO & error budget facilitation.


• Demonstrable experience of messaging and event streaming systems and frameworks.


• Working knowledge of networking technologies such as HTTP, TLS, DNS, SNMP.


• Experience in producing runbook and technical systems documentation.


• Contribute to design, implementation, and support large-scale projects, with critical infrastructure.


• Advocating proven principles and practices and actively influencing cultural change within an organisation., 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.
  
  As one of the world's leading media organizations, the BBC reaches a weekly global audience of 447 million people. Media Services serves as a critical bridge between content production and online users, contributing to a remarkable 7.3 billion iPlayer streams in the last financial year.
  
  Our comprehensive benefits package includes:


• An employer pension contribution of up to 10%


• 26 days' annual leave (based on full time hours) + bank holidays and the option to buy/sell additional days


• Contributory lifestyle benefit options including discounts at hundreds of retailers, cycle to work scheme, discounted gym memberships and healthcare schemes


• Employee assistance and well-being programmes


• Learning and development tailored to your role - this could include industry recognised qualifications, coaching and mentoring


• An inclusive and diverse environment with opportunities to join staff networks including: Women's Network, National Disability Networks and many more.


• Family friendly flexible working arrangements, such as hybrid working, job sharing, flexi-time and compressed hours can be requested.


We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and especially welcome individuals from underrepresented groups.