JOB DESCRIPTION

Job title Senior Operations Engineer

Senior Operations Proposed
Job family D
Engineer band

Job purpose
The aim of the role is to work as part of a team on to provide 24/7/365 operational
support, incident management and stakeholder communication for the systems used to
produce, publish and serve content for a range of BBC platforms and services (possibly
including mobile, tablet, desktop, and IPTV).

Responsible for collaborating on, and contributing to end-to-end business support for
systems and the applications for the related Editorial/Production, Broadcast and
Development teams, and is shift based to reflect the nature of the operational work.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities

 Use a diverse range of monitoring tools, including but not limited to those
mentioned further below, to identify and diagnose complex service impacting issues
across a range of technologies and platforms
 Technical analysis and resolution of a diverse range of incidents impacting live
services. Initiate the response to service disruption, and support proactive measures
aimed at preventing recurrence
 Use problem solving techniques and technical knowledge to translate alarms from
components into real-world impact, to inform and guide incident response. Provide
guidance to junior team members in the same.
 Logging all incidents accurately, and documenting all investigative activities; including
all technical means employed to ascertain the nature of the fault and remedial action
taken.
 Managing incident and escalating as appropriate and as per defined processes. Use
experience or knowledge to advise the team on decisions on this.
 Implementing appropriate contingency procedures in response to planned or
unexpected events
 Thorough handover of incident and environmental information through shift
changes to colleagues within the team
 Keep abreast of operational changes in a fluid environment, ensuring that individual
and team actions are taken in line with current best practice
 Use strong communication skills to articulate accurate information to technical and
non-technical audiences in the course of addressing an incident, and in related
actions afterwards. This includes composing communications to large, diverse
audiences and acting as the point of contact for operational management.
 Able to discuss or convey complex technical systems both verbally in meetings, calls
etc, and non-verbally in incident tickets and documentation.
 In the absence of the Team Lead Operations Manager or the Principle Operations
Engineer has full accountability for the operational team out of hours, and
consequently for the management of internal or audience services.
 Responsible for training junior members of the team, and for providing guidance to
all team members as appropriate
 Provides technical leadership of responses to complex and/or major issues, and

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handles escalations from junior operational team members

 Expected to contribute technically or procedurally to the development of the
operations team, with a view to efficiency or technical improvements
 Arbiter of good problem solving practice, ensuring logical and sensible team activity
 Able to provide feedback on team and individual performance to line management
 Adaptable, and able to operate effectively in changing environments
 Ensure that the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act, Working Time
Directive and other workplace related legislation are observed ; responsible for
ensuring that risk assessments are completed, appropriate and meet BBC
standards; responsible for ensuring appropriate method statements are reviewed
and fit for purpose

Knowledge, skills, training and experience

Essential
 Good technical knowledge, including broad understanding of varied and complex
systems built on different platforms, from many separate components, or deeper
specialism in one area.
 Experience in supporting a wide range of broadcast and production technologies,
systems and equipment including: mixers, linear and non-linear edit systems, camera
systems, audio and video recorders, studios, analogue and digital distribution and IP
content networks, routers, communications systems, video and audio servers,
automated scheduling, etc.
 Experience of operating within, or demonstrable knowledge of multi-platform
environments
 Excellent grasp of good problem-solving principles, and logical judgement
 Experience of the principles of monitoring and interacting with a range of
applications and services
 Experience in logging and managing incidents in an operational environment, the
typical challenges, and guidance required to enforce good practice
 Familiarity with using a range of diagnostic and monitoring tools
 Ability to communicate effectively with external providers and internal partners,
including senior stakeholders
 Troubleshooting and diagnosing defects in complex systems with an appreciation of
real-world impact
 Able to create, maintain, and enhance supporting documentation for the Operations
team
 Appreciation of the principles of prioritisation according to service impact, and the
ability to work under pressure
 Proven ability to share knowledge with team members for mutual gain
 Training skills required to improve the skills of junior members of the team
 Knowledge of current safety legislation and BBC safety policies, security policies and
statutory requirements relating technical support operations.
 NVQ level 5 or above in a relevant technical discipline
 Excellent knowledge of BBC health and safety standards, approaches and processes
and other relevant regulatory requirements

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Desired
 Experience in media and creative environments
 Understanding of the principles of network connectivity
 Delegation and strong interpersonal skills

Job impact
Decision making

The role holder will report into the Team Lead Operations Manager, who in turn reports
into the Operations Manager.

Senior Operations Engineers make frequent decisions towards managing the team response
to an incident. This includes decisions on prioritisation, escalation, and technical response,
as well as handing escalations from junior team members. These decisions have an impact
on live products or services, either consumed by the audience or fulfilling an internal BBC
function, and the consequences can be felt very widely in both cases. The nature of these
decisions feeds into monthly reports and determine compliance or otherwise with
departmental or team objectives and SLAs. The Senior Operations Engineer will also decide
on the extent to which any incident is communicated, and is responsible for assembling any
communications necessary to large, diverse, and senior audiences.

The role holder will work with a large number of internal and external teams and
individuals in the course of operating the BBC’s services, products, and platforms. Most of
these will have different perspectives on those services, including end users, management,
and support. Principle relationships and interactions include:

- Operations Engineer Team Lead. The SOE will work alongside the Operations
Engineer Team Lead (TL) who is also their line manager. The relationship centres
mainly on day-to-day operational work but also pastoral work where it is required –
one-to-ones and development in role
- Team Lead Operations Engineer or Principle Operations Engineer – here the SOE
will work in close partnership with their senior operational team member, providing
guidance or working in line with agreed team management practices.
- Service Managers – The SOE will work with Service Managers (SM) by way of
escalation, or as the intermediary between operational and product teams, and will
provide technical guidance as necessary.
- Systems Engineers – Operations Engineers will interact frequently with Systems
Engineers in the course of fixing issues, and also in a knowledge sharing capacity
- Third Party. Chiefly operational teams at business partners in both a break/fix
capacity and also in regular relationship management meetings
- Senior Management – Both operational or otherwise the SOE will at times be the
most senior member of the operational team present, and will therefore interface
with senior management as necessary.

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Scope

Finance: The job role has no financial responsibility

Line Management: There is no line management responsibility, although the SOE will govern a
team’s actions and direct them, as well as informing line management decisions, and
helping to uphold agreed team management practices.
Ad-hoc teams: May participate in working groups around particular projects, or represent the team
as a subject matter expert for a particular service or technology. Will frequently be asked
to lead intra-team working groups and participate in incident-response conferences.

Other information
For Reward team use only
Job Code
Definition: Content

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.

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Appendix

There may be sub-sets of the generic job described above which require additional technical skills.
This appendix to the generic job description can be developed to cover such situations.

Division BBC Scotland, Operations & Engineering

Reports to (title) Team Lead Operations Manager
Location base Pacific Quay, Glasgow

Organisation The chart below is indicative of the team structure but

structure not staff numbers/headcount.

Technology Operations
Manager

Infrastructure & Media

Radio & Vision Team Lead
Systems Team Lead

Senior Ops Senior Ops Senior Ops Senior Ops

Engineer Engineer Engineer Engineer

Operations Engineers Operations Engineers

Additional job specific responsibilities and accountabilities

This role is that of a Infrastructure Specialist. A senior engineer who has extensive
knowledge of IT Infrastructure delivery and support, data center technologies including
SAN storage and servers, networking including security, and virtualization technologies
such as VMware and Citrix.

Main Responsibilities

 Design / architect, develop and administer infrastructure solutions, selecting

software and hardware components to meet requirements.
 Performs 3rd line technical support, performing analytical, problem solving,
research and testing activities to resolve/fulfil requests at an expert level to meet
resolution/workaround targets.
 Install, maintain and monitor systems running on both physical hardware and
virtualised environments. Assist with the maintenance of live production software.
Automate build and configuration where possible. Perform these tasks individually

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and with the assistance of team members.

 Deploys and contributes to the design of hosted infrastructure (on Prem and
Cloud), liaising with Technical leads and through own continual improvement
initiatives to maintain and continually improve efficiency, cost effectiveness and
customer satisfaction.
 Conducts communication with customer and colleagues professionally and
courteously throughout support request fulfilment to meet targets
 Maintain a secure environment. Take all reasonable measures to mitigate the
potential risks involved in operating internet-connected equipment. Apply BBC
information security requirements.
 To collaborate effectively with other technical teams to exploit new technologies
to enhance the applications and service infrastructure.
 To assist the Technology Operations team with service launches by providing
timely adoption documentation, training and assistance with problem resolution.
 Captures and analyses support requests from customers, colleagues and
monitoring tools to accurately define, categorise and prioritise support requests
 Create and deliver efficient and appropriate communication with a diverse range of
key stakeholders throughout the incident lifecycles, and ensure other team
members observe best practice if doing so.
 Fully understands, supports and upholds key departmental processes (e.g. Incident
mgt, Change mgt, Asset mgt). Captures all activity as directed by process to
measure departmental activity against operational targets
 Responsible for providing leadership in the management, transition, release,
maintenance and support of hosted services, alongside contributing to the ongoing
design of hosted offering.
 Documents, composes and executes complex requests for change that may
influence solution design to configure and implement changes on systems to meet
change deliverables
 Maintain knowledge of industry and competitor developments
 Develop expertise in new technologies and existing technologies and drive the
introduction of them where appropriate
 Partner with the project manager and project support staff to enable them to
provide effective and informed reporting

Essential Skills

 Must have good experience of Technical Infrastructure and IT Service Management

and substantial hands on experience in support and design of storage and
virtualization technologies.
 A subject matter expert (SME) with the flexibility to deal with 3rd line escalations
from engineers and also provide input to multiple projects.
 Experience of enterprise level system monitoring, software deployment and
compliance tools.
 A strong working knowledge of virtualisation, especially VMware.
 Experience of configuring Cisco Routing, Firewalls and Switches.
 A solid understanding of Cloud infrastructure and configuring VPN connections to
on Prem.

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 Knowledge of network topologies and configuration techniques such as VLANs.

 Good knowledge on Windows Server 2012/16.
 Good knowledge of Linux OS e.g at least two from Redhat, Centos, Ubuntu

 Desirable Skills
 Experience of Quantum/Stornext storage solutions
 Understanding of ITIL processes and best practice
 An understanding of production workflows, file transfer and metadata
 An appreciation of BBC output and a passion for technology in the new media
environment

Approval

Manager
Name and job title

HR Business Partner
Name

Date

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