Staff Software Engineer

Warner Bros. Discovery; Bellevue (KY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking a technically broad Staff engineer to shepherd complex platform problems from design to production. You will build and operate CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, deployment automation, and release tooling, while guiding cross‑org technical discussions that drive platform adoption.

You’ll mentor engineers, define the architecture, and break down work for teams, owning systems end‑to‑end—from whiteboard diagrams to runbooks keeping systems healthy at 2 AM.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience leading the technical direction of complex systems, influencing across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous projects through architecture to production delivery.
• Cross‑team influence and effective communication to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical direction across delivery and deployment platform capabilities, roadmap, and scale.
• Lead cross‑team design‑to‑production initiatives with architecture alignment and delivery ownership.
• Own platform programs including resilience, disaster recovery for CI/CD infrastructure and adoption of automated release safety.
• Build and evolve CI/CD tooling, pipelines, artifact management, release automation, and developer interfaces.
• Establish on‑call, incident response playbooks, gameday, and documentation culture.

Skills

CI/CD

Kubernetes (K8s)

AWS

GitHub Actions

Terraform/CDK/CloudFormation

Go/TypeScript

Java/Kotlin/Python

Technical storytelling & architecture

Remote collaboration

Tools

GitHub

Artifactory/ECR

Job description

_ Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of. _

Who We Are…

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!

Who We Are…

When we say, “the stuff dreams are made of,”we’renot just referring to the world of wizards,dragonsand superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD’s vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellersbringing our characters to life, the creatorsbringing them to your living rooms and the dreamerscreatingwhat’snext…

From brilliant creativesto technologytrailblazersacross theglobeWBD 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.

Softwaredevelopmentteams 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.

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’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.

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.

How We Get Things Done…

Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.

Championing Inclusion at WBD

Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of our society and the world around us. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, regardless of sex, gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, disability, or any other category protected by law.

If you’re a qualified candidate and require