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With 95% of the UK using the BBC every week, we’re the highest reaching media provider in the UK, driven by the strength of our Broadcast portfolio across TV and Radio. Beyond the UK we are building one of the world’s biggest global media brands, reaching over 500 million people a week worldwide across TV, Radio and online.

Using up-to-date technologies and working methodologies, the Playback team builds the media players used to deliver BBC content across all browsers and mobile applications, powering BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds, BBC News, BBC Sport and more. We handle live media, catch-up media, podcasts, and support 1000s of different devices, including PCs, phones, tablets, and Chromecast/Airplay.

We are part of Media Services, the department that builds highly scaled media capabilities that are relied on by millions of users every day, both internally and externally to the organisation. The iPlayer, Sounds and News apps are installed on over 75 million phones and tablets worldwide; during the Men’s Football World Cup in 2022, across our online portfolio, we served a peak of 2.5 million concurrent users with a data volume of over 21 terabits per second transferred to viewers. It’s fair to say that we operate at significant scale.

Our mission is to build a reliable, scalable, flexible, and personalised media platform to help secure the future of the BBC in an internet age, as media distribution moves towards being predominantly IP based.

Our amazing Playback team is at the heart of the Audience’s experience of BBC content. We are a highly agile, fast-moving, and motivated multi-disciplinary team who take pride and responsibility for the components they design, build, and deliver. As a team we succeed and fail together, working in a no blame culture where we see ‘failure’ as an opportunity to learn and improve.

This role is based in Salford and will work closely with the mobile development team and report into the executive product manager. There is the opportunity to work on the web product and other platforms which the Playback team as a whole are responsible for.

Job Details

Are you a business analyst (or have the skills to become one)?

Do you want to develop ground-breaking ideas, work with cutting-edge technology, and help the BBC make incredible online experiences?

Do you want to work with a range of multi-disciplinary experts, including amazing development teams who focus on best-practice engineering?

Do you want to work for one of the world’s best-known brands; famous for bringing trustworthy content to our audiences across the globe?

This is a role to be a business analyst in the BBC’s Playback team. It’s an exciting and ambitious opportunity to help shape one of the world's largest and most complex online media products. A thorough understanding of what we have and what we're trying to do is essential, and as a business analyst you’ll provide the expertise to help make that happen.

Example challenges that you could work on include:

• How can we ensure the audience receives the best quality audio-visual content, whilst dealing with the necessary constraints of internet bandwidth?

• How can we ensure the user experience and UI of our media players is optimised for ease-of-use, familiarity and is able to support our demanding accessibility requirements?

• How can we balance the requirements of a video-based service such as BBC iPlayer with the audio-only needs of BBC Sounds?

In this role, you’ll need to think big picture about the overall system, whilst also getting into the technical details of what the requirements are and how they compare to our existing capabilities.

The tech challenges you’ll face in this role are tricky. We've been building media players for over ten years, and they exist within a large and varied technical estate. You'll need to understand what we have and how it needs to change to meet ever-changing requirements. You’ll be challenged regularly and will get to work on some exciting products. Colleagues and experts will support you at every step. And there’s great opportunity to learn and grow, whilst keeping a good work-life balance.

Technology

Here are some of the technologies we use. If you apply for this role, we don’t expect you to know all of these, as there will be opportunities to learn as you go.

Our mobile media players are native applications built on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms; it’s not necessary to be familiar with the languages the platforms use (Swift, Kotlin, JS), but an awareness of them will be useful.

Our web media player is written in JavaScript and HTML5 for use in web browsers.

Streaming technologies used are DVB-DASH and HLS.

The full range of software engineering and UX tools are also used in the course of our work, which include, but are not limited to: Github, JIRA, Confluence, Miro, Figma, etc.

The day-to-day

Culture: In this role, you’ll work with our product team, our software engineering team, our UX team and our many stakeholders. Every day you’ll collaborate with a wide range of high-calibre professionals, of all disciplines. We have an open and respectful culture where everyone’s opinions are valued.

Location: The role is based in Salford, and you’ll likely need to come to the office for some of the week for collaboration. The rest of the time, you’ll be able to choose the home or office, based on where you work best. Our primary offices are based in Salford, Glasgow, and London. They are great places to work - modern, bright, and well-equipped. You may need to travel to London occasionally, especially in the first few months in the role.

Tech: You'll get your choice of Mac or Windows laptop, access to great collaboration software (such as Slack and Zoom), and, of course, a range of other tools and software to help you do your job effectively.

Growth: This is a flexible role, which you can shape based on how you’d like to grow your skills and career. There are always plenty of opportunities to learn, take on new responsibilities, attend conferences, and so much more.

• Talking to our many and varied stakeholders across the BBC, gathering, documenting, and communicating business requirements.

• Work with the Product Managers, Developers, and UX team to break down the epics and milestones to create deliverable user stories with clear acceptance criteria.

• Analysing data after launch, to make sure solutions perform as expected and benefits are realised.

• Analysing data to help inform future product direction, performance, and strategy.

• Work with Product Management to build business cases and to provide cost/effort estimates.

Whilst we’re after candidates who have a background in business analysis or software development, we also seek people who have a passion to learn. It’s not essential you have every skill here; it’s more important that you can develop and learn as part of your role.

• You'll enjoy working very closely with product managers, project managers, developers, designers, and stakeholders, understanding and shaping requirements, getting features and work ready for development.

• You'll be a fast learner, able to pick up and reason about complex technologies.

• You will have strong data analysis skills to help develop and implement processes for the monitoring and reporting of media playout performance. Use the results of this monitoring to help inform production direction.

• You'll be a strong team player (facilitating collaboration and teamwork) and focus on what the customer needs.

• You’ll have excellent communication skills, both written and spoken evidenced by the ability to communicate across all levels of an organisation

These skills would be a bonus:

• Familiarity with streaming media technologies.

• Familiarity with data query languages such as SQL.

• Data visualisation tools, e.g., Grafana, Tableau.

• Familiarity with Cloudwatch and audience metrics systems, e.g., Piano, ComScore, or similar.

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 in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of 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.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: London

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

• Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits- We offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.