Senior Staff Software Engineer - Content Experience Platform

Senior Staff Software Engineer

The Direct to Consumer (DTC) Group is a technology company within Warner Bros Discovery. We are building a global streaming video platform (OTT), and a suite of applications to support all of our network's brands globally. We are building modern container-based micro-services operated on AWS. Our platform covers everything from search, content catalogue, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and much more. We enable performant streaming experiences across connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles for a large footprint of WBD owned streaming services (HBO Max, Discovery+, CNN, and others). This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to WBD's future.

We are hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer within the DTC Content Experience Platform. The team is responsible for aggregating, enabling, and serving the personalized Content Discovery experience within our DTC streaming video platforms through our Experience Services APIs. We ensure all client applications worldwide have seamless access to the latest and relevant content metadata, personalized browse experiences and curations, and presentational elements to deliver a best-in-class content discovery experience to our hundreds of millions of streaming users globally across our different streaming service platforms.

Your Role Accountabilities...

• Drive long-term architecture and technical direction across multiple workstreams, ensuring cohesive design and scalable foundations.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to senior product and engineering leadership—translating technical opportunities and constraints into strategic input that influences product direction and company priorities.
• Lead complex, cross-team initiatives that require deep coordination, influencing beyond formal authority.
• Guide the technical growth of the organization by mentoring Staff+ engineers, setting high standards, and sharing knowledge broadly.
• Set the bar for operational excellence, engineering velocity, and system reliability, identifying and fixing systemic issues.
• Serve as a connector across domains, bridging teams, technologies, and business contexts to deliver integrated solutions.
• Represent engineering in company-level discussions, helping translate business goals into a sustainable technical strategy.
• Take responsibility for the long-term health and evolution of core systems and infrastructure, making principled trade-offs along the way.

Qualifications and Experience...

• At least 10 years of experience with deep expertise in Java or other JVM languages, and a strong grasp of advanced language features and performance tuning.
• Proven experience in architecting and scaling distributed systems in cloud-native environments, with microservices, asynchronous communication patterns (e.g., gRPC, Kafka), and event-driven architectures.
• Has led the design and implementation of low-latency, high-throughput APIs powering real-time systems with demanding SLAs.
• Strong knowledge of data persistence, indexing, and caching strategies, with experience optimizing PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, and in-memory caches like Caffeine for large-scale production environments.
• Has introduced or evolved observability practices across teams, including distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or Zipkin.
• Experience leading teams in adopting and scaling infrastructure as code practices using GitOps, Terraform, ArgoCD, or Helm.
• Skilled in setting up and evolving monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes, using tools such as Prometheus, CloudWatch, Kibana, and PagerDuty.
• Practical experience with non-blocking, asynchronous, and reactive programming models using frameworks such as Spring WebFlux, Reactor, or Vert.x, with a focus on resilience and throughput.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate and evolve technical stacks, guide technology adoption, and make forward-looking platform decisions. Has a proven track record of leading architecture and technical direction across multiple teams or domains, not just a single work stream.
• Thinks and operates at an organizational level—connecting product, technical, and operational strategy across functions.
• Recognized as a trusted technical leader who mentors Staff-level engineers and influences broader engineering culture and direction.
• Excels at navigating complexity and ambiguity—balancing short-term business impact with long-term platform evolution.
• Champions a culture of technical excellence, inclusive collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Combines deep technical expertise with strong product and business acumen to align engineering direction with company priorities.
• Proactively identifies systemic issues and opportunities across teams and leads cross-org initiatives to improve architecture, performance, and ways of working.
• Combines deep technical expertise with strong product and business acumen to align engineering direction with company priorities and challenge initiatives which don't provide value.

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, 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 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.