Senior Architect Account and Identity

BBC Studios Ltd; Cardiff; Hybrid; GBP 64,000 - 96,000; Full time

Job summary

A prominent media organization seeks a Senior Architect to enhance user engagement capabilities across digital platforms. This role involves developing strategies for integrating new capabilities into services like web and mobile, ensuring high performance and security. Ideal candidates will demonstrate strong experience in designing scalable architectures, particularly in AWS, and possess excellent communication skills to collaborate across diverse teams. Join us in shaping the future of interactivity and audience participation.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Competitive salary package

25 days annual leave

Defined pension scheme

Qualifications

• Proven architecture experience designing high-volume, near-real time platforms.
• Expertise in AWS, relational and non-relational databases.
• Excellent communication skills to influence stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Contribute towards User Engagement Architecture Strategy.
• Develop target architecture to address operational gaps.
• Communicate technical requirements to external partners.

Skills

AWS expertise

Software solution architecture

Communication skills

Scalability knowledge

Data lifecycle understanding

Education

Relevant degree or equivalent experience

Tools

EC2

Lambda

DynamoDB

Job description

Cardiff, GBR, CF10 1FT | Glasgow, GBR, G511DA | London, GBR, W1A 1AA | Newcastle-upon-Tyne, GBR, NE991RN | Salford, GBR, M50 2QH

JOB DETAILS

JOBBAND: D

CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time

DEPARTMENT: BBC Product Group

LOCATION: London, Glasgow, Salford, Newcastle, Cardiff

PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £64,000 - £96,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. If you’d like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there’s no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

Our audiences’ expectations of digital media have shifted dramatically. They live in a culture of interactivity, sharing, and feedback, where participation is as valuable as the content itself. Stories are no longer broadcast, they evolve through the dialogue and engagement of the digital community who consume them.

Bringing people together is central to the BBC’s Value for All strategy, but at the moment, our services can often feel passive and closed. By not enabling dialogue and contribution, we risk being left behind as other platforms become the spaces where audiences gather, share, and connect.

The BBC’s User Engagement team is responsible for owning the above problem space and managing user participatory capabilities such as Commenting, Moderation of User Generated Content, Quizzing, Polling and Voting.

We are looking for a Senior Architect to help expand the BBC’s ability to integrate new capabilities into the BBC’s online platforms. You will, amongst other things, be responsible for developing approaches for standardising the way experiences can be integrated with the BBC’s services across web, mobile, TV and Smart Speaker platforms. You will also assume responsibility for some of the existing portfolio of capabilities as well as for governance and security of those services.

Our core environment is AWS utilising a range of common services such as EC2, Lambda, SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB, RDS etc.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

This is a role that will see you embedded in cross‑functional teams operating within the Product Operating Model, working with other specialists to discover and deliver the best solutions for the emerging problems in the user engagement space. You will be fully empowered in a technical leadership role to ensure the team follows architecture best practice and delivers strategic solutions that reach millions of audience members.

We want the BBC to be as renowned for the quality of its engineering as it is for the quality of its content. This role offers the opportunity to work in a collaborative environment, on systems of national scale and impact, shaping the future of participation and interactivity at the BBC.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT

• Contribute towards the wider Account & Identity Architecture Strategy and drive the development and adoption of the Architecture Statements within User Engagement.
• Understand the major gaps and challenges in the domain and develop a target architecture to address these; along with detailed designs for the individual solutions which move us in the right direction.
• The User Engagement space is one in which we have many external partners. You will be responsible for communicating our technical requirements and vision to these partners to ensure we continue to innovate and improve our services.
• Accountable for architectural decisions; embedding oversight into cross‑functional teams and documenting choices through ADRs.
• Provide architectural support across the BBC ecosystem, ensuring technical coherence, managing dependencies, and minimising complexity.
• Champion patterns, best practices, and evolutionary design approaches to deliver secure, robust, and repeatable solutions.
• Listening to business challenges and priorities and communicating an architecture vision / approach clearly to all stakeholders which can assist in solving these.

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:

• Proven architecture experience designing high‑volume, near‑real time platforms with strong focus on resilience, reliability, and security.
• Expertise in AWS (particularly EC2, Lambda), relational and non‑relational databases, and the full end‑to‑end data lifecycle from exploration to production.
• An understanding of information security issues and how to effectively mitigate these.
• Experience of building scalable software solutions.
• Ability to advocate for cost optimisations across internal Cloud Environments and partner solutions. Encourages cost‑aware design decisions across Engineering Teams.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with multi‑disciplinary teams to deliver on architectural strategy.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence, translate technical detail, and shape a compelling strategic vision.
• Data and evidence‑based approach to decision making with a creative and driven approach to problem‑solving.
• Knowledge of cloud‑native and microservice architectures across multiple domains (web, mobile, data).
• Experience evaluating and advocating for emerging technologies to deliver business value.

DESIRED BUT NOT REQUIRED:

• Experience of supporting use cases such as personalisation, machine learning, advanced analytics, interactivity and gamification.
• Experience in agile software delivery at scale, with a perspective on what good looks like in data engineering.
• Awareness of behavioural and ethical design when architecting participatory experiences for audiences.
• Practical experience engineering reliable event‑driven architectures and asynchronous workflows at an enterprise level scale.
• Domain relevant integration experience with external partners, including event and analytics consumption and social media integrations.

If you can bring some of these skills and experience, along with transferable strengths, we’d love to hear from you and encourage you to apply.

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 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.

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.

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.

Information at a Glance

This is your BBC

At the BBC you can create and innovate in an inclusive environment while contributing to some of the world’s best loved content, and the BBC’s mission to inform, educate and entertain.

Find out more about the BBC

Life at BBC

Benefits

• Fair pay and flexible benefits including a competitive salary package, a flexible 35‑hour working week, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym.
• Excellent career and professional development.
• Support in your working life, including flexible working which you can discuss with us at any point during the application, selection or offer.
• A values‑based organisation where the way we do things is important as what we do.

Benefits may vary if you are joining on an FTC basis or on an orchestra conditions contract.

Learn more about life at the BBC and our values in our candidate pack.

You belong

We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, so all our employees feel that they can belong, thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to join us. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio‑economic background, religion and/or belief.

Find out more about diversity, inclusion and belonging in our strategy below.

Disability confident

We are a disability confident employer. If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, or to carry out this role, please contact us via email and we’d be happy to discuss: [e-mail]

BBC Group and Public Services, Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London, United Kingdom, W1A 1AA

BBC Studios Distribution Limited, company no: 01420028, registered address: 1 Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, London, United Kingdom W12 7FA.

Note: The portion of the original description that included provider information, LinkedIn, and code snippets has been removed as it was not relevant to the role’s description.