Staff Software Engineer

This job is with Warner Bros. Discovery, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

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!

About the Team / What We Do

The Live control Plane team’s mission is to simplify and orchestrate the lifecycle of live events – from initial configuration and provisioning through to live playback, VOD(video on-demand), and syndication. We act as the orchestrator between many critical components in the video pipeline, ensuring everything works together seamlessly and reliably.

We build and operate services that :

Manage the lifecycle of live events including configuring, bootstrapping infrastructure using Upstream services, health monitoring, and tear-down.

Orchestrate Live-to-VOD workflows, enabling creation of replay / catch-up assets with minimal manual intervention.

Enable syndication of content to third-party partners and platforms in real-time, with custom packaging and metadata requirements.

Serve as a stateful coordinator across distributed services – source ingest, encoding, packaging, playback and partner delivery. Handling complex workflows with high resilience.

Provide observability and tooling for real-time visibility into live events.

What You’ll Do / The Job

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join Live Control Plane which manages the lifecycle of live events from creation to distribution. As part of this team, you’ll build and evolve the services responsible for provisioning and managing live events, coordination of various components involved in live streaming and ensuring smooth transitions from live to VOD (Video On-demand). You will also help scale the workflows and streamline the process by automation.

As a Staff Engineer, you will be responsible for

Design and build orchestration services that act as the control plane for live events – managing the lifecycle from scheduling and provisioning to cleanup and archival.

Driving various initiatives including evaluating new technology, developing and maintaining our Live Streaming platform, and prototyping and building functionality and tools for new and existing Live Video systems.

Develop and maintain event-driven workflows that coordinate between systems and monitoring systems to ensure seamless live streaming experience.

Scale infrastructure to distribute both live and VOD content to a diverse set of partners including internal products and external third-party partners.

Work with cross-functional stakeholders to define and implement API and contracts that allow for flexible and composable workflows

Drive reliability and observability across the orchestration platform – designing health checks, alerts, audits, and distributed tracing.

You will partner with other stakeholders to understand goals and needs and will continuously assess all aspects of the products and tools to identify areas for improvement, innovation, and cross-project sharing.

Roles and Responsibilities

Lead architectural discussion and help define the technical strategy and roadmap of the platform.

Write, review, deploy, and maintain end-to-end Live Streaming platform features.

Partner with Product Managers and Program Managers to create technical solutions for customer requirements and evaluate feasibility from both a technical and cost perspective.

Pair with other team members to develop and deliver platform features.

Analyze your team’s systems, processes, and infrastructure to identify improvements for robust services.

Lead the mitigation of incidents, assess root cause, and determine appropriate long-term fixes.

Participate in the improvement of the team’s agile development processes and help evolve engineering best practices.

Provide mentorship and coaching to junior team members.

Utilize container systems (Docker) and container orchestration frameworks (e.g. ECS / EKS, Kubernetes).

Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation.

Nurture and maintain a culture of peer accountability where customer and team development are the focus.

THE ESSENTIALS

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent, preferably in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

8+ years of relevant distributed systems experience.

Back-end knowledge and willingness to work beyond your comfort zone.

Experience with Golang, Docker, and Kubernetes is strongly preferred.

Ability to maintain long-term platform level thinking by taking a comprehensive approach while troubleshooting tasks.

Experience implementing and deploying distributed systems in public cloud environments.

Proven ability to own the development of features from concept to launch.

Focus on personal and team growth that fosters camaraderie.

Embraces a growth-mindset by continually learning and appropriately applying new techniques, approaches, or technology.

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 : $145,600.00 - $270,400.00 salary per year. Other rewards may include annual bonuses, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. In addition, Warner Bros. Discovery provides a variety of benefits to employees, including health insurance coverage, an employee wellness program, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and sick time and vacation.

]]>