Overview

Principal QA Engineer, Strat. Partners role at BBC. LOCATION: London or Salford or Newcastle or Glasgow. This is a hybrid role balancing office and home working. CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent. DEPARTMENT: Product Group Enablement. PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £90,000 - £100,000.

Purpose of the role

As a Senior Principal QA Engineer, you will play a strategic role in ensuring the delivery of high-quality software by third parties working in partnership with BBC leaders across Product Group. You’ll apply an understanding of digital products and technologies to shape and drive quality standards in relation to work with partners and influence internal quality strategies. You’ll collaborate with product, engineering, test and design teams throughout the Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) and work in lock-step with Test leadership. Your deep understanding of quality assurance best practices, together with your knowledge of software development, will be critical in shaping scalable, efficient, and reliable solutions that deliver value for our audiences.

Why join the team

Join a team where quality is a strategic priority. As a Senior Principal QA Engineer within Product Group’s Enablement team, you’ll shape how the BBC assures the quality of its software experiences through trusted third-party partnerships. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams across product, engineering, test, and design, influencing quality standards that impact millions of users. This is a unique opportunity to drive meaningful change within one of the world’s most respected media organisations.

Your Key Responsibilities And Impact

• In partnership with Test and Engineering leadership across Product Group, lead the design and implementation of test strategies across multiple products supported through third party suppliers.
• Champion quality throughout the product development lifecycle (PDLC), from requirements analysis to deployment and maintenance.
• Work with leadership across Engineering – both in the BBC and with partners – to embed best practices, such as integrating automated quality checks into CI/CD pipelines and agile workflows.
• Define and maintain quality metrics and KPIs to measure and improve software reliability and performance.
• Evaluate and implement new tools, technologies, and methodologies to enhance testing capabilities.
• Support initiatives to reduce defect leakage and production incidents.
• Advocate for testability, observability and quality in architecture and design discussions.

As one of Product Group’s most senior technical leaders, you will mentor aspirant technical leaders across Product Engineering and be a visible technical leader for that community.

Essential Criteria

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Proven experience in senior-level or principal QA roles, with a strong track record of leading quality engineering or testing in complex software environments impacting multiple teams, including web or mobile front-end testing experience.
• Deep understanding of the SDLC, agile methodologies, and DevOps practices, with familiarity with shift-left practices.
• Familiarity with benefits and challenges of test automation frameworks and opinions on how generative AI solutions may play a role (e.g., Selenium, Cypress, Playwright) and scripting languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript).
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a keen eye for detail.
• Experience with hands-on functional and exploratory testing.
• Strong understanding of non-functional testing practices, including performance and security.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate across teams.

Desirable But Not Required

• Experience in cloud-native applications and microservices architecture.
• Familiarity with AWS services.
• Familiarity with performance monitoring tooling.

Employment safeguards

Disclaimer: This job description outlines essential characteristics and principal accountabilities for satisfactory performance. BBC conducts employment screening checks including references, eligibility to work, safeguarding, and, where applicable, adverse media/social media checks. Any offer is conditional on satisfactory checks.

For general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk

Redeployment: The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment with priority consideration where relevant.