Warrington, England, United Kingdom
I have been working with computers for most of my teenage and for all of my adult life, and have been developing code to varying degrees for the majority of that time. I am a fast learner, and I can plug any holes in my knowledge required for me to perform any technical role in a short space of time and to retain the knowledge to be able to perform the associated tasks to the highest standard of quality. Whilst my move to join the BBC Sport & Live Services team (later restructured to become the Sport Web Data team) was my first move into professional software engineering, I quickly established myself as a core member of that team and rapidly rose to become a Senior Software Engineer, also fulfilling the role of a senior member of the team beyond just the title. I participated in department-wide Engineering Leads meetings and was frequently a go-to person within the team when assessing a problem or future piece of work. I moved into my new team as part of BBC Core Services during the Coronavirus Lockdown, and despite the adaptations we all had to make as a result of being a fully-remote team, was able to quickly establish myself as a valued member of the team, being able to contribute meaningfully to our codebase within the first week of being onboarded. Since then, I have expanded my own remit in joining BBC-wide working groups on performance and service workers, aiming to become my team’s subject matter expert in those areas. I have also joined the BBC’s security champions programme and participate in weekly steering sessions with the department and its stakeholders in other departments about the technical direction of the platform. In 2021 I was promoted to the level of Principal Software Engineer, and joined the department’s engineering leadership team, where I have been actively contributing to the wider technical strategy and direction of the department and – due to the wide scope of the platform we provide – the BBC as a whole. I have since become even more involved in the development of technical roadmaps for the Presentation Layer team and the discovery, shaping and architecture of complex technical approaches to hard-to-solve issues at a large scale.