Senior Data Scientist (Senior Software Engineer), BBC Verify

Job Reference: 20803
Band: D
Salary: Up to £70,000 plus London weighting depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
Contract type: Permanent
Location: London - Hybrid

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.

Job Introduction

BBC Verify brings together open-source intelligence (OSINT) specialists, disinformation reporters, fact checkers and data journalists to find impactful stories and to offer new lines and compelling coverage of the biggest issues across BBC News's website, social media, television and radio.

The successful candidate will work alongside three other data scientists, using their computing skills to multiply the story-finding and story-telling capacity of BBC Verify.

Main Responsibilities

This is a role for a data scientist, programmer, or a mix of both who specialises in ingesting, analysing and explaining satellite data and who can work effectively in news as part of a multidisciplinary team.

Their computing skills will enable the team to find new stories, to pick which story ideas to follow and to find stories faster from satellite imagery, APIs.

Examples of recent projects include:

• Automating steps in the collection and presentation of satellite imagery in order to speed the assessment of damage in military conflict.

Are you the right candidate?

The successful candidate must have:

• Extensive experience finding newsworthy insights in a broad range of satellite data sources
• Extensive experience developing automated tools that have the potential to find stories in satellite data
• Experience of embedding the latest research practices/techniques relating to use of satellite data in non-expert groups
• Extensive experience programming in R and/or Python to automate the extraction, cleaning, transformation and analysis of satellite data
• An understanding of delivering stories or projects with editorial content to tight deadlines
• Experience identifying, proposing and delivering new ideas for analysis OR improvements to workflows based on technical skills and understanding of the organisation's needs.
• The communication skills to work with non-technical colleagues to identify the technical strengths and weaknesses of story ideas and to explain analysis findings and caveats clearly and concisely

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons 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.

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 here.

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.