Staff Software Engineer

Staff Engineer

Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of. When we say, "the stuff dreams are made of," we're not just referring to the world of wizards, dragons and superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD's vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellers bringing our characters to life, the creators bringing them to your living rooms and the dreamers creating what's next…

From brilliant creatives, to technology trailblazers, across the globe, WBD offers career defining opportunities, thoughtfully curated benefits, and the tools to explore and grow into your best selves. Here you are supported, here you are celebrated, here you can thrive.

At HBO Max, storytelling takes center stage. We're one of the world's most iconic entertainment brands — home to bold originals and unforgettable characters. While audiences binge award-winning content, breaking news, and sports around the clock, our teams stay busy at work creating what's next in streaming. From Succession, Euphoria, and The Sopranos to global franchises like Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, our content sparks conversation and shapes culture.

HBO Max delivers boundary-pushing stories across genres and platforms, connecting millions of viewers across 90 countries globally— and we're just getting started. We're home to the most talked about shows and movies, granting audiences access to the worlds of HBO, Harry Potter, DC, Warner Bros., ID, Adult Swim, A24, and more. Turn your streaming obsession into a career— we're hiring!

Your New Role

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'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.

Your Role Accountabilities

• 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.

Qualifications & Experience

• 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.

Good to Have

• 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.