Principal Software Engineer - GenAI

Job Title: Principal Software Engineer - GenAI
Salary: £80,000 - £90,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights
Band: D
Location: London / Salford / Glasgow / Newcastle / Cardiff (Candidates will be considered for either location. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working)

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your preference under the flexible working question in the application. There’s no obligation to raise this at the application stage, but if you wish to do so, you’re welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

Purpose Of The Role

Step into the world of the BBC, one of the UK's most iconic and beloved brands, where every working day is as unique as it is rewarding. Every tick of the clock, our content reaches millions of people globally, which is made possible by our top-notch Software Engineering team. They've been instrumental in pioneering innovative products and unique features that have firmly positioned us at the forefront of our industry. We don't merely adapt to an ever-changing world - we set the pace.

With this role you'll be at the heart of an exciting journey, crafting tools and patterns that are state-of-the-art and transformative. We are the catalysts, enabling the creation and collaboration of cutting-edge ML and AI technologies. Our work is pivotal in shaping the BBC's future, empowering teams across the organisation to explore, innovate, and redefine the landscape of media. Our team is building out new tools and capabilities to accelerate data science activities and the development of ML/GenAI applications. We enable teams across the BBC to build, collaborate on, manage, and maintain their machine learning platforms at scale.

You will play a key role in driving our ambition to build an outstanding software engineering team, environment, and culture. We are looking for a Principal Engineer to join our tech community to drive this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem using exciting technologies and do the best work of their careers.

Your Key Responsibilities And Impact

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of robust tooling and platforms to support scalable Data Science, MLOps, and LLMOps workflows across the organisation.
• Drive strategy and execution for deploying, serving, and monitoring large language models (LLMs) in real-time and batch environments using Amazon SageMaker, Bedrock, and related services.
• Guide the use of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices with AWS CDK and CloudFormation to provision and manage secure and maintainable cloud environments.
• Design and support CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, and other tools, with an emphasis on reliability, reusability, and performance.
• Contribute to the design and integration of monitoring and observability solutions (CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana) to ensure infrastructure and model health.
• Champion software engineering excellence through Test-Driven Development (TDD), rigorous test automation, and continuous quality assurance practices.
• Support architectural decisions for scalable and maintainable systems, collaborating with engineering and product stakeholders to align with business and technical goals.
• Partner with architects, product leaders, and stakeholders to shape the long-term technical vision and system architecture
• Apply and advocate for security best practices across the software development lifecycle using AWS-native tools and DevSecOps principles.
• Cultivate a high-performing engineering culture through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and thought leadership via deep dives, brown bags, internal tech talks, and cross-team collaboration.

Your Skills And Experience

• Extensive experience in DevOps/MLOps roles with demonstrated impact in building, scaling, and securing ML/AI infrastructure in cloud-native environments.
• Strong experience with AWS services such as SageMaker, Bedrock, S3, EC2, Lambda, IAM, VPC, ECS/EKS, with a strong command of cloud solution architecture.
• Advanced proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code practices using AWS CDK, CloudFormation, or Terraform in production environments.
• Proven track record designing and operationalised end-to-end MLOps pipelines with tools such as MLflow, SageMaker Pipelines, or equivalent frameworks.
• Extensive experience building and operating containerised applications using Docker and Kubernetes, including production-grade orchestration and monitoring.
• Deep experience with CI/CD best practices with hands-on expertise in GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitOps workflows.
• Strong knowledge of advanced DevOps concepts, including progressive delivery strategies (blue/green, canary), resilience engineering, and performance optimisation.
• Deep understanding of cloud security, governance, and compliance, with the ability to define and implement scalable security frameworks.
• Proven ability to drive cross-functional technical initiatives, influence without authority, and deliver results through collaboration and alignment.
• In-dept understanding of the ML lifecycle, with practical experience deploying and managing LLMs and generative AI models in production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.
• Industry-recognised certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Machine Learning Specialty, or AWS Solutions Architect – Professional.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams or business units.
• Active contributor to open-source MLOps, GenAI, or DevOps projects and communities.
• Experience mentoring others, leading by example, and contributing to a culture of technical excellence.

Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Contracts of Employment policy. This allows us to discuss any support you may need and assess any risks. Failure to disclose may result in the withdrawal of your offer

Disclaimer

This 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.

Please note: If you were to be offered this role, the BBC will conduct Employment screening checks which include Reference checks; Eligibility to work checks; and if applicable to the role, Safeguarding and Adverse media/Social media checks. Any offer made is conditional on these checks being satisfactory.

For any general queries, please contact: [email protected]

Redeployment

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC 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.