Staff Software Engineer

Warner Bros. Discovery•Atlanta, GA

About The Position

CNN is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the design and development of its cross-platform Analytics SDKs — the foundational layer that powers behavioral data collection and product analytics across CNN’s entire digital footprint. Your SDK is how CNN understands its audience: every content interaction, engagement signal, and behavioral event across web, iOS, Android, OTT, and emerging platforms flows through the systems you build. That data powers audience analytics, content performance measurement, ad targeting, personalization, and the business intelligence that helps CNN’s journalists produce award-winning journalism that speaks directly to their audience. This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer with deep SDK architecture and API design experience who is ready to move into a more strategic position. You will define the SDK architecture, establish engineering standards, and partner closely with data platform, application, and product teams to ensure high-quality, performant, reliable analytics collection that is easy to adopt across all CNN applications. If you want to build the instrumentation layer that an entire newsroom depends on — and shape how analytics engineering works across CNN — this is the role.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including senior or staff-level technical leadership
Strong experience designing and maintaining SDKs, libraries, or shared frameworks used by multiple teams
Deep understanding of software design principles, API design, versioning strategies, and long-term maintainability
Experience with client-side analytics, telemetry, or event-based data collection systems
Proficiency in one or more of the following, with the ability to learn others as needed: Java/Kotlin, Swift/Objective-C, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go or Python
Strong familiarity with cloud-based architectures and how client SDKs interact with backend services
Solid understanding of networking fundamentals, performance optimization, and reliability in distributed systems
Track record of delivering high-quality, well-documented software that other teams trust and adopt

Nice To Haves

Experience building analytics or telemetry systems at scale (millions of events per second)
Familiarity with event schemas, data contracts, and analytics validation pipelines
Experience supporting privacy, consent management, and data governance requirements in client-side software
Background working with experimentation, personalization, or advertising instrumentation
Experience enabling end-to-end analytics workflows from client instrumentation to downstream analytics systems

Responsibilities

Architect, build, and maintain CNN’s cross-platform analytics SDK and supporting tooling across web, iOS, Android, OTT, and other client environments
Lead as the subject matter expert in analytics instrumentation, client-side data collection, and SDK design across the organization
Define SDK best practices around API design, backward compatibility, versioning, performance, privacy, and reliability
Partner with Product, Analytics, Data Engineering, and Application teams to translate analytics requirements into clean SDK capabilities
Influence CNN’s technical strategy for data collection, client event instrumentation, and data privacy — contribute meaningfully to planning across client engineering and platform teams
Mentor and provide growth-centered feedback to other engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural guidance
Communicate designs, architectural decisions, and tradeoffs clearly to engineers and leaders at all levels
Drive improvements to best practices, documentation, SDK ergonomics, and architectural patterns proactively