Staff Software Engineer

WarnerMedia Services, LLC; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 166,000 - 308,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement savings plan

Paid holidays and vacation

Employee wellness program

Life and disability insurance

Job summary

Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking a technically broad Staff engineer to take complex platform problems from design to production.

You will own CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and release tooling while mentoring engineers and guiding cross‑org conversations. You’ll influence architecture, drive platform initiatives, and ensure production readiness for scaling across teams in the Direct‑to‑Consumer and release engineering spaces.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of leadership in complex systems and cross‑team influence.
• 5+ years building and operating CI/CD systems and platforms.
• 3+ years with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure in production.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical direction for delivery and deployment platform capabilities.
• Lead cross‑team design‑to‑production initiatives with architecture documents.
• Mentor engineers and represent the team in cross‑org forums and vendor reviews.
• Establish operational standards including on‑call and incident response.

Skills

Staff Engineer

Cross-team influence

Architectural design

Mentoring engineers

Software delivery

Tools

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Gradle

Maven

Bazel

npm/yarn

Rush

Make

JFrog Artifactory

ECR

Terraform

CDK

CloudFormation

Kubernetes

AWS

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, WarnerBros., 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 thestorytellersbringing our characters to life, thecreatorsbringing them to your living rooms and thedreamerscreatingwhat’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.

Software development teams in WBD’s Direct‑to‑consumer (DTC) division build and deliver applications and services powering the customer experience of products such asHBO 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 2AM. 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 we 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 adjustments or accommodation to search for a job opening or apply for a position, please contact us at [e-mail].

How We Get Things Done… This last bit is probably the most important!

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 some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their 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 a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law. If you’re a qualified candidate with a disability and you require adjustments or accommodations during the job application and/or recruitment process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions to submit your request.

In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles in locations where legally required. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors, including but not limited to external market data, internal equity, location, skill set, experience, and/or performance. Base pay is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees.

• Pay Range: $165,690.00 - $307,710.00 salary per year.
• Other rewards may include annual bonuses, short- and long‑term incentives, and program‑specific awards.
• Health insurance coverage, an employee wellness program, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and sick time and vacation.

Warner Bros. Discovery, a premier global media and entertainment company, offers audiences the world's most differentiated and complete portfolio of content, brands and franchises across television, film, streaming and gaming. The new company combines WarnerMedia's premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery's leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses.