Senior Software Engineer - Remote Eligible

Senior Engineer at CNN

With deep domain expertise, advanced technical capabilities, and a proven track record of successful collaborations, the AI Enablement & Machine Learning team at CNN is accelerating our digital transformation through strategic applications of ML and AI technologies. Our current products include popular, related and personalized content recommendations, contextual ad targeting, and site search-serving millions of CNN users via CNN web and mobile apps. This year we are partnering with teams across the company to democratize AI at CNN. Our "multiplier" approach allows our team to have outsized organizational impact by providing domain expertise, enabling teams, collaborating deeply, and building shared infrastructure.

The team is composed of multiple squads: the platform squad along with cross-functional squads that leverage the platform to develop products. As a senior engineer on our platform squad, you will work on a team of 4+ engineers and optimize experimentation, development, and production operations for our ML and AI-powered experiences. You will build and maintain pipelines and APIs, provide developer tooling, and partner on integrations.

Here are some of the key challenges our team will tackle this year:

• Optimize Site Performance: Dynamically deliver personalized content alongside cached assets, improving load times and enhancing user experience with features like page-level deduplication
• Enhance Data Access: Continue to evolve our pipelines to ensure the timeliest access to instrumentation and content data for feature and model development
• Accelerate Experimentation: Partner with our Data & Analytics organization to improve the tooling and coordination involved in A/B testing
• Support Generative AI: As generative AI tools like Bedrock emerge, enhance our platform to support them, ensuring we're prepared for the next generation of AI-powered applications
• Democratize AI at CNN: Expand our developer tools and create an intuitive, safe environment for non-experts to build with AI

Here are some of the things you can expect to do on a day-to-day basis:

• Work closely with ML engineering to make data easily accessible and understandable
• Ensure the reliability and minimize the latency of data delivery for ML use cases
• Create transparency in our data pipelines with comprehensive telemetry
• Develop and enforce data engineering, security, data quality standards through automation
• Collaborate with other engineers to develop and enhance core capabilities, infrastructure, and architecture
• Leverage vended and open-source cloud technologies to reduce maintenance costs and improve efficiencies, ensuring our products remain profitable
• Ensure that code is readable, maintainable, scalable, observable, and resilient
• Independently own and execute on projects within your squad
• Collaborate effectively with engineers across the team to deliver projects scale and integrate ML and AI features into the website, mobile app, and editorial tools
• Contribute to the design of components and systems and represent your thoughts in architecture reviews
• Be responsive to incidents and participate effectively in incident retrospectives
• Champion improvements to developer experience, integrations, and testing processes
• Support, coach, mentor, and provide valuable feedback to junior engineers on your squad

Here is the approach we value:

• Author, review, and optimize production-quality code that adheres to industry standards and best practices (IaC, CICD, etc.)
• Demonstrate a passion for software engineering, with a strong sense of responsibility for the code you and your team write
• Take ownership of issues and be a strong advocate for your team and the products
• Embrace failure as a learning opportunity—use research and experimentation to ultimately choose the best solutions that meet company goals
• Follow a progressive development methodology, moving from proof-of-concept to prototype to production release
• Enhance the effectiveness of your squad, the team, and our partners by sharing your knowledge, communicating about complex technologies and problems in simple terms, and driving technical decisions
• Collaborate across functions, squads, teams, and organizations to best serve our users

The Essentials

We're looking for someone with:

• 5+ years progressively complex experience designing, building, and shipping products
• 3+ years experience in data engineering roles or backend roles with a data focus
• 2+ years experience building data pipelines with IaC
• 2+ years experience with Python
• 2+ years experience in one of Golang, Java, C++
• 2+ years experience with Kafka or equivalent
• 2+ years experience with Databricks or equivalent
• Proficiency with Postgres or equivalent
• Proficiency with DynamoDB or equivalent
• Proficiency with Terraform or equivalent
• Deep understanding of common software data structures and algorithms and experience in modern data engineering technologies and best practices
• A proven track record of building real-time products for web scale that are highly available and performant
• A collaborative mindset, understanding that great results come from teamwork and a positive culture

The Nice to Haves

• Experience with ML feature stores
• Practical experience developing and maintaining ML data pipelines and tooling
• Understanding of experimentation frameworks and A/B testing methodologies
• Practical experience with recommendations, search and/or personalization

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.