Senior Data Scientist (Senior Software Engineer), BBC Verify

Senior Data Scientist (Senior Software Engineer), BBC Verify

Permanent - Full Time

Location: London, GB, W1A 1AA

Job Reference: 20803
Band: D
Salary: Up to £70,000 plus London weighting depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience.
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.

• 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 negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme, and discounted dental, health care, and gym.

BBC Verify brings together open-source intelligence (OSINT) specialists, disinformation reporters, fact checkers, and data journalists to find impactful stories and offer new lines of compelling coverage across BBC News’s platforms.

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

Main Responsibilities

This role requires a data scientist or programmer who specializes in ingesting, analyzing, and explaining satellite data and can work effectively in news as part of a multidisciplinary team.

The candidate’s computing skills will enable the team to find new stories, select which story ideas to pursue, and find stories faster from satellite imagery and APIs.

Examples of recent projects include:
Automating steps in the collection and presentation of satellite imagery 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 to find stories in satellite data.
• Experience embedding the latest research practices/techniques relating to satellite data in non-expert groups.
• Extensive experience programming in R and/or Python for automating 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.
• Strong communication skills to work with non-technical colleagues to identify strengths and weaknesses of story ideas and explain analysis findings clearly and concisely.

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and will give priority consideration to them.

We value our values and behaviours, which are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours.

Diversity matters at the BBC. 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. The more diverse our workforce, the better we can respond to and reflect our audiences.

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.

DISCLAIMER

This job description outlines the essential characteristics of the job, including principal accountabilities and the skills, knowledge, and experience required for satisfactory performance. It is not intended to be a complete account of all aspects of the duties involved.

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