Senior Principal Software Engineer

Job Details

Role: Senior Principal Software Engineer

Department: Web

Job Band: E

Contract Type: Permanent, Full-time

Proposed Salary Range: Up to £103,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience.

Location: Salford, Glasgow, London, Newcastle, Cardiff. Hybrid role balancing office and home working.

Purpose of the Role

Join the BBC’s Web area as a Senior Principal Software Engineer to help engineer outstanding digital products at scale. You’ll work across all web teams to identify and deliver engineering opportunities, drive technical excellence, and support millions of daily users. Collaborating with engineering and architecture leadership, you’ll champion innovation, AI, and engineering velocity—helping make the BBC website even more successful while shaping world‑class engineering standards across the Product Group.

Key Responsibilities And Impact

• Be a role model for engineering culture—embodying values such as quality, collaboration, curiosity, inclusion, and pace.
• Work closely with engineering teams and the principal engineer community to drive best engineering practice and build strong, inclusive teams.
• Share best‑practice and understanding across all six web groups to drive collaboration and consistency.
• Help the successful operation of the BBC website, including acting as Incident Commander during major incidents.
• Focus on innovation and engineering velocity to help teams create new product value safely and efficiently.
• Champion AI adoption in engineering and testing, evaluating solutions like GitHub Copilot and promoting best practice.
• Partner with other disciplines to solve complex challenges and provide insight into engineering strengths and opportunities.

Essential Skills and Experience

• Significant experience as a lead/staff/principal software engineer (or similar role), with a strong track record of impact across multiple teams or domains.
• Deep knowledge of modern web technologies (e.g., React, TypeScript, Node.js, CSS) and experience working on large‑scale, high‑availability web platforms.
• A collaborative and empowering leadership style, with experience mentoring engineers and influencing stakeholders across disciplines.
• Comfort working in a matrixed or cross‑functional environment, building coalitions across teams with different goals.
• A user‑focused mindset, considering accessibility, performance, and inclusivity as foundational principles of good engineering.

Desired But Not Required

• Experience supporting critical projects, such as a General Election, where reliability and responsiveness are essential.
• Familiarity with AI tools and approaches, including GitHub Copilot, and an understanding of their practical and cultural implications.
• Knowledge of rapid prototyping techniques to support product and UX discovery.
• Understanding of experimentation frameworks and tools that enable safe, scalable testing across multiple teams.
• Experience improving CI/CD pipeline efficiency and test automation to enhance engineering velocity.

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.