Lead Broadcast Support Engineer

Lead Broadcast Support Engineer - An exciting new opportunity to help lead the broadcast technology team at NewsUK.

The Team:

You’ll be joining and leading a supportive and collaborative team of broadcast engineers, working together to share knowledge, develop skills and help make brilliant radio and TV. The team are responsible for complex studio and broadcast systems, managing them to ensure high quality, uninterrupted transmissions.

Your Role:

As Lead Broadcast Support Engineer, you’ll be part of News UK’s Broadcast Technology leadership team, a group of four people reporting to the Head of Broadcast Technology. You will be jointly responsible for the support, development, maintenance, fault management, performance, and readiness of News UK’s broadcast systems and networks, both at our London studios and on location at outside broadcasts.

You will line-manage, coach and direct a group of shift engineers, developing their skills and performance, providing regular feedback and facilitating appropriate structured training.

In co-operation with the Lead Broadcast Operations Engineer, you will be responsible for maintaining the shift rota, day-to-day scheduling, forward planning, risk management and task assignment within the Broadcast Technology team.

You will co-ordinate and direct the team’s response to faults and support issues, ensuring their prompt and effective resolution, liaising with other departments and third parties as required.  

You will take part in an on-call rota to respond to critical technical issues outside standard hours.

You will ensure the general upkeep and tidiness of the studio, racks rooms, stores and office and areas used by the Broadcast Technology team.

You will uphold and participate in change management protocols for all Broadcast Technology changes

Day to day:

• Provide customer-focussed support for broadcast technology users
• Plan, schedule and perform routine and essential maintenance of broadcast systems
• Maintain and solve problems with hardware, software and systems
• Plan and deliver training for your team and other technology users
• Work with outside companies and internal departments to promptly resolve faults
• Implement new systems to support changing broadcast requirements
• Document systems, processes and procedures
• Communicate status updates and review the progress and resolution of support issues
• Manage shift rotas, arranging cover for absence and forward planning to account for holidays, project workload, etc
• Seize every opportunity to grow and develop your skills
• Support Brilliant Broadcasting

What we’re looking for from you:

• A passion for exceptional customer service and prompt resolution of all issues, regardless of the ultimate point of responsibility or demarcation
• An expert understanding and technical background working with professional analogue, digital and IP-based studios and signal paths in radio and television
• A positive attitude with exceptional client-facing interpersonal skills for written, oral and face-to-face communications
• The ability to assess risk and ensure that you and your team work in a safe manner at all times
• Experience managing and developing peers in both day-to-day task assignment and strategic development
• Willingness to work unsociable hours on occasions
• Strong numerical and written skills
• A broad understanding of available and emerging technologies
• Understanding of IP-based media technologies
• Knowledge of broadcast playout, newsroom, scheduling and production systems
• Ability to maintain and repair professional broadcast equipment.

We are News Broadcasting: Driving digital innovation, our people create award-winning national and local radio and podcasts which are must-listens for millions across the UK, Ireland and beyond. Life sounds good with Virgin Radio - home to Chris Evans at Breakfast and Graham Norton at the weekend. talkSPORT, the world’s biggest sports radio station, delivers the very best live sport and analysis and is truly powered by its millions of fans. Launched in June 2020 Times Radio brings together the peerless journalistic expertise of The Times and The Sunday Times with world-class broadcast talent including John Pienaar, Aasmah Mir and Michael Portillo. In 2022 we launched TalkTV, a major new TV channel available to everyone across the UK, delivering a schedule of news, current affairs, entertainment and sport, with Piers Morgan in a primetime evening show.

Life at News: At News UK our people are our heartbeat - they are the driving force behind our brands and we want to enable people to thrive.  Some of us work flexibly, in many different ways. We encourage you to talk to us about the flexibility you would like.  Many of us work in a hybrid way between one of the News UK & Ireland offices and remotely.  

We champion diversity and inclusion, we strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity Board, D&I  strategy & training, creating more diverse content and our intern and apprenticeship programmes.  We also have 11 employee-led networks. 

We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK supporting the Health and Wellbeing of our staff. Some of what we offer includes: 

• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;
• 25 days holiday and up to 4 volunteering days per year;
• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks;
• Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.
• Private medical insurance covering pre-existing conditions
• Discounted gym memberships, ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual HIIT, yoga and run club classes
• ‘Bikes for Work’ scheme
• Access to wellbeing benefits such as physio/massage and counselling 

We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when interviewing. Please let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.  

News UK is an official partner of the Journalism Diversity Fund, founder of the Journalism and Disability Forum, and proud member of the Valuable 500. At News UK, we will continue to promote an inclusive and diverse workplace, to help people with visible and non visible disabilities create careers in media and aim to make our content accessible to all.