Job Specifications
JOB DETAILS
Band: F
Location: London, Salford, Glasgow, Cardiff, Newcastle – hybrid working
Contract Type: Permanent / Full Time
Proposed Salary Range: £105,000 - £120,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.
PURPOSE OF THE ROLE
The BBC has been serving audiences online for more than 20 years. Across key products including BBC iPlayer, BBC News, BBC Sport, BBC Weather, BBC Sounds, and bbc.co.uk, we entertain, educate, and inform millions every day.
We are making a fundamental shift from being a broadcaster that speaks to audiences, to becoming a service shaped by them — designed around their needs, expectations, and trust. Personalisation, data-driven decision-making, and responsible use of technology are central to this ambition.
As Head of Data Governance and Responsible AI, you will lead the enterprise-wide vision, strategy, and operating model that ensures the BBC’s data and AI are trusted, well-governed, ethical, and product-focused. You will enable innovation across multiple enterprise data platforms and product domains, while safeguarding audience trust, editorial integrity, and regulatory compliance.
This role operates across a complex, federated data and AI landscape, spanning multiple platforms, diverse business domains, and a wide range of stakeholders across technology, product, editorial, and corporate functions. You will be accountable for governance across a broad portfolio of data products and AI use cases, balancing consistency with local autonomy in a large, regulated, public-service organisation.
This role is critical to ensuring data and AI are treated as products with clear ownership, quality standards, lifecycle management, and accountability and that Data Governance best practises and Responsible AI principles are embedded into the platforms and services that power the BBC, rather than applied retrospectively.
Your Key Responsibilities And Impact
Strategic Leadership
Define, prioritise, and deliver the BBC’s enterprise Data Governance and Responsible AI strategy across a diverse portfolio of data platforms and AI initiatives.
Own the governance roadmap, sequencing capability in line with organisational readiness, transformation milestones, and business priorities.
Set clear enterprise-wide expectations for how data and AI are created, governed, and consumed across platforms.
Act as a senior advisor to executives on data and AI risk, ethics, opportunity, and platform readiness.
Make informed trade-offs between innovation, delivery pace, risk, and trust, escalating and resolving issues at senior level where required.
Represent data governance and Responsible AI at senior leadership forums and externally where appropriate.
Data Governance, Platforms & Data-as-a-Product
Establish and maintain enterprise data governance frameworks covering ownership, quality, metadata, lineage, classification, lifecycle management, and access controls.
Embed data-as-a-product thinking across enterprise data platforms, ensuring data products have:
named owners
clear service expectations and contracts
measurable quality and usability metrics
defined lifecycle and support models
Work closely with data platform, product, and engineering teams to ensure governance is designed into platforms, tooling, and operating models, rather than applied retrospectively.
Enable scalable, secure, and trusted use of data across analytics, AI, and operational use cases.
Ensure transparency, consistency, and trust across the BBC’s digital and enterprise data ecosystem.
Responsible AI Leadership
Lead the BBC’s Responsible AI principles, policies, and operating model, ensuring ethical, transparent, and accountable use of AI across platforms and products and enabling teams to make informed decisions.
Define and implement a risk-based governance framework for AI systems covering risk assessment, bias mitigation, explainability, human oversight, and auditability, with accountability embedded in delivery teams.
Operationalise Responsible AI by embedding measurable requirements into delivery pipelines and platform tooling, enabling teams to meet standards through normal development workflows.
Records Management
Set and steward enterprise records management standards and policies, ensuring consistent classification, retention, disposal, and defensible record-keeping across data, content, and AI-related artefacts.
Lead the central records management capability, coordinating lifecycle management of records across platforms and teams, and providing guidance and assurance to support regulatory, legal, and editorial obligations.
Team Leadership & Capability Building
Lead and develop a m