Staff Software Engineer

Warner Bros. Discovery•Bellevue, WA

7d•$165,690 - $307,710

About The Position

Software development teams in WBD’s Direct-to-consumer (DTC) division build and deliver applications and services powering the customer experience of products such as HBO MAX, Discovery+, Bleacher Report, TNT etc., which run on connected TVs, set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, consoles, PCs, and other streaming devices. The Delivery & Deploy team within Release and Delivery Engineering owns the final leg of WBD's software delivery platform — the pipelines, tooling, and automation that take software from a passing build to a safe production release. We serve 2,000+ engineers across DTC's streaming products, providing a simple, reliable path to production built on modern practices that emphasize testability, repeatability, and self-service automation. You are a technically broad Staff engineer who takes complex, ambiguous platform problems from design to production. You've built and operated the infrastructure that lets thousands of engineers ship software safely — CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, deployment automation, and release tooling — and you've led the cross-org technical conversations that made adoption stick. You don't just build for your immediate team. You develop working architectures, write the design docs that align stakeholders, break down the work for your team, and mentor engineers from concept through delivery. You've owned systems end to end: from the first diagram on a whiteboard to the runbook that keeps it running at 2 AM. You're as effective influencing direction with leadership as you are reviewing a pull request. Your breadth — spanning build systems, delivery pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling — lets you connect dots that specialists miss and make better tradeoffs because you understand the full picture. You are judged as much on the positive impact you have on engineers around you as on your own output.

Requirements

5+ years of experience leading the technical direction of complex systems, involving yourself and other engineers. You make good decisions on architecture, know when to build new vs. extend existing, and are persuasive in delivering your recommendations to teams and stakeholders through data and facts.
Demonstrated ability to take projects from ambiguous problem statement through architecture, stakeholder alignment, implementation, and production deployment — without needing someone to break it down for you.
Track record of cross-team technical influence: you've driven adoption of platform capabilities across engineering organizations that didn't report to you.
Strong communicator: your design docs are clear, your technical presentations land with non-technical audiences, and your code reviews leave engineers better than you found them.
5+ years building and operating CI/CD systems, with depth on both the build (CI) and deployment (CD) sides of the lifecycle.
5+ years with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or comparable systems — including designing reusable pipeline patterns and enforcing organizational standards at scale.
3+ years hands-on with build systems (e.g. Gradle, Maven, Bazel, npm/yarn, Rush, Make) and a solid understanding of dependency trees, reproducible builds, and build performance at scale.
Experience with artifact management platforms (JFrog Artifactory, ECR, or equivalent) — lifecycle policies, repository governance, access control, and artifact promotion across environments.
5+ years with AWS, including EKS, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, and networking. Strong understanding of how cloud services compose into production-grade delivery infrastructure.
3+ years with IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation) — not just authoring templates but designing reusable, maintainable infrastructure patterns.
5+ years hands-on with Kubernetes (K8s / AWS EKS), including deployment lifecycle management, rollout strategies, workload identity, and cluster-level troubleshooting.
5+ years as a software developer using at least one of: Go/TypeScript (strongly preferred), Kotlin/Java, or Python. Solid command of how applications are structured, built, and operated in production.
Strong CS fundamentals and a track record of implementing highly reliable automation and tooling.
Experience managing GitHub at organizational scale — Actions workflows, org-level policies, OIDC / federated identity integration, and security controls.
Operational experience: on-call rotations, incident response, postmortem facilitation, playbook authoring, and gameday execution.
2+ years collaborating with remote teams across geographies and time zones.
Excellent written communication skills with particular emphasis on technical documentation and architecture diagrams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with progressive delivery patterns: canary releases, blue/green deployments, automated rollback triggers.
Observability experience in a delivery context: using metrics, traces, and logs to understand pipeline health, failure rates, and developer experience at scale. Hands-on experience with Prometheus and Grafana to instrument, observe, and alert on platform metrics.
Exposure to developer experience measurement — DORA metrics, deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate.
Experience with serverless/Lambda platform patterns on AWS.

Responsibilities

Drive technical direction across delivery and deployment platform capabilities: setting the architectural roadmap, making build-vs-extend decisions, and ensuring the platform evolves to meet growing scale and organizational needs.
Lead design-to-production on complex, cross-team initiatives — authoring design documents, running technical alignment across stakeholder groups, and owning delivery through to production readiness.
Own critical platform programs — including resilience and disaster recovery planning for CI/CD infrastructure, and driving adoption of automated release safety mechanisms across engineering teams.
Build and evolve CI/CD tooling — pipelines, build systems, artifact management, release automation, and developer-facing interfaces that give engineering teams self-service control over how their software is built and shipped.
Establish operational excellence standards: on-call practices, incident response playbooks, gameday facilitation, and the documentation culture that makes hard systems understandable.
Mentor engineers on the team — reviewing designs, pairing on hard problems, and modeling what Senior and Staff-level ownership looks like.
Represent the team in cross-org technical forums, vendor relationships, and architecture review processes.