Job Package
Salary range: £60k to £70k
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Salford Dock House, Hybrid role
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. Minimum of 3 days in office for this role is expected due to the team’s in-office presence.
We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and especially welcome individuals from underrepresented groups.
If you require any reasonable adjustments at any time, please let us know by contacting us on with the job reference in the subject.
Job Introduction
The BBC is one of the UK’s most well-known and loved brands and is a unique and rewarding organisation to work for. We deliver content to millions of people globally every day.
The Content Metadata team is responsible for designing, building, and supporting the systems that create and manage the descriptive metadata associated with all types of content; BBC Sounds audio, iPlayer video, News/Sport/World Service articles, and so on. We’re building a central system of common metadata to describe these varied types of content. Descriptive, well-structured, and centralised metadata allows other BBC products to provide a rich, engaging and above all relevant experience to millions of audience members every day, for all sorts of BBC content, across all manner of audience products.
We're a cross-functional team of developers, testers, product owners, data managers and data scientists, and work with varied technology stacks across a number of products. We want the BBC to be as renowned for the quality of its engineering as it is for the quality of its content. We aspire to be the best so that we can engineer outstanding digital products, at scale. Working here means being part of a world-class team and a chance to do the most meaningful work of your career.
The BBC’s digital products play a key role in our mission to inform, educate and entertain the audience. This is a great opportunity for you to take a leading position at the centre of products used by millions.
Role Responsibilities
What we’re looking for
The Content Metadata team is looking for an experienced, professional, and enthusiastic Test Team Lead to join
a world-class team responsible for designing, building, testing and delivering the BBC’s content metadata
systems. The role is partly management - developing, mentoring, and inspiring the test engineers on the team
- and partly hands-on work involved in defining test processes across our range of products, owning the Test
strategy and working with the Engineering Manager to develop and drive that strategy.
Our team spans multiple sites (Salford and London), so you will be comfortable with the challenges of
collaborating with colleagues remotely.
Your responsibilities will include:
People:
• Line management responsibilities for 4-6 test engineers.
• Recruiting and onboarding of new test team members.
• Mentoring and developing team members to help them to reach their potential.
• Inspiring and motivating the team to help them deliver a world class audience experience.
• Help to foster a collaborative and inclusive culture across the department.Technical Leadership:
• Leading the software testing within the team, designing and implementing test processes for a broad
range of complex products, across varying technical stacks that span front-end tools and back-end
services with rapid release cycles.
• Ownership of the team Test Strategy and capable of both deciding on, and innovating in, our choice of
test technologies and processes.
• Knowledge and experience of automation testing frameworks.
• Playing a key role in defining the technical direction of the wider metadata space through collaboration
with other engineering leads, as well as product and delivery colleagues.
• Expertise in agile software development methodologies, including BDD and TDD.
Delivery:
• Work with cross-discipline partners to plan and commit to quarterly deliverables.
• Work with stakeholders across the organisation to align with goals and mission.
• Close collaboration with the development team in an agile working environment.
Are you the right candidate
• Experience of building and leading a team of test engineers.
• Experience working in a cross-discipline environment and of managing stakeholders.
• Experience in different automation frameworks.
• Experience as owner of Test Strategy and able to influence wider engineering decisions accordingly.
• Experience working within a multi-site team or department.
• Experience working in a team responsible for delivery and support of live software systems and
understanding of the production support and incident response commitment of such a team.
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 behaviours .
Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all 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.