Senior AI Engineer

JOB DETAILS JOB BAND: D CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time DEPARTMENT: BBC Media Technology LOCATION: Salford PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £60,000 - £70,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights. PURPOSE OF THE ROLE The Senior AI Engineer (Gen AI) will help the BBC make practical use of AI tools and systems to solve business problems and help our internal teams work effectively and efficiently. The role will collaborate closely with project managers, data scientists, analysts, domain experts, and the BBC's technical teams to build the data pipelines and technical solutions that enable AI projects to move effectively through piloting to successful handover to the business for scaling. WHY JOIN THE TEAM These roles will sit within BBC Media Technology and be embedded within the BBC’s Strategy and Transformation team, focusing on Gen AI transformation The Generative AI Team helps the BBC realise value from rapidly evolving AI capabilities in a way that is practical, responsible and aligned to the BBC’s public service mission. The team’s activities include enabling adoption of AI tools across the organisation; leading innovation and transformation work; and leading the BBC's engagement on the wider AI issues that shape our operating environment. The work we do makes the most of AI to deliver value for the BBC’s teams and audiences. The challenges are new and exciting, and you'll have real influence over how one of the world's most trusted public broadcasters adopts AI in a way that is practical, responsible and true to its values. Your Key Responsibilities And Impact * Help evaluate AI and automation capabilities, both existing and emerging, using data and evidence to inform decisions about the most appropriate solutions for BBC contexts. * Design and develop data pipelines, technical components and supporting capabilities that enable the evaluation and adoption of agentic and AI automation tooling. * Work with colleagues across the team to design AI, agentic and automation solutions that address clearly defined operational or domain-specific problems. * Build secure, resilient and maintainable data engineering solutions that support experimentation as well as more scalable use where appropriate. * Collaborate closely with domain experts, data scientists, analysts, researchers, designers and project management teams to translate requirements into valuable solutions. * Contribute to good engineering practice across the team, supporting high standards in data quality, governance, documentation and continuous improvement. * Ensure work is carried out in line with the BBC’s organisational values, security requirements and responsible approach to AI adoption. Your Skills And Experience Essential criteria * Experience with designing, delivering LLM-based workflows or applications including pipelines, models and platform components. * Strong engineering practices including proficiency in Python and demonstrable use of AI assisted development tools to improve code quality and delivery pace. * Hands-on experience with: + Cloud platforms and infrastructure (AWS preferred) – including Infrastructure as Code + Container and orchestration tools (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes) * Experience of working with multidisciplinary teams to understand business or user problems and translate them into valuable solutions. * Ability to evaluate new tools or technologies critically, using evidence and sound judgement to assess their effectiveness and suitability. Desirable criteria * Familiarity with API development frameworks (FastAPI or equivalent). * Experience building with Generative AI and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI) and managed AI services (e.g. Bedrock, Azure). * Familiarity with enterprise automation toolsets (e.g. Microsoft Power Platform, Copilot Studio) and an understanding of how they complement bespoke AI solutions in large organisations. * Sound understanding of data governance, security and quality considerations, with the ability to apply these appropriately in innovative or experimental contexts. * A strong academic background or research credentials in data or AI engineering or a related discipline. 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. Before your start date, you may need to disclose any unspent convictions or police charges, in line with our Recruitment 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. For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk We are unable to accept applications via CV and only applications made online will be considered. Please click on the APPLY NOW button to proceed with your application. 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.