Every great story has a new beginning, and yours starts here.
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.
Your New Role…
We are the team that provides the databases needed to make Direct to Consumer applications work… if you are using the app, you are using our services. We are looking for an engineering leader who can handle all the aspects of a growing technical charter, from architecture, design, engineering, operationalization, and operations of a globalized product offering. If you are interested in building distributed platforms that run at extreme scale, which can be operated in a simple manner by a team of highly-technical engineers, this is an excellent learning opportunity.
We are not a team of traditional “on-prem DBAs.” Deep knowledge of databases is a core competency for our engineers, but we take inspiration from the Reliability Engineering discipline and we invest significantly in cloud automation. Our ideal candidate combines database skills with cloud knowledge, software engineering expertise, and operational excellence. If you are passionate about building and owning things that are real, tangible, and essential to the business, look no further.
Your Role Accountabilities…
• Recruit and lead a team of experts. Hire the best, and be mindful of diversity in all forms as there are multiple ways to be the best. Cultivate potential within the team, and provide a pathway for people to succeed from entry level all the way to the most senior technologists.
• Deliver data platforms that can operate at a massive scale, distributed globally, for an international audience with the most demanding viewership patterns imaginable… consider the architecture and operational excellence required to deliver a reliable user experience in the face of marquee events which can draw in millions of viewers in an instant. Engineer for cloud-destroying traffic patterns.
• Deploy infrastructure in a declarative manner, using modern pipeline technologies, and embracing IaC principles in everything we do.
• Perform maintenance and upgrades on stateful infrastructure resources without downtime or incident. TV can’t ever go down for the weekend or even for a minute, and you can’t just specify a new platform version in your terraform. Be the absolute best in your company and your field.
• Keep data accessible and secure. Partner with security and compliance to design systems using modern technologies to make system and user access as effortless as possible within the needs to protect content, user privacy, and integrity.
• You won’t have to worry much about backups and recovery, because you build things to just work that way out of the box. It isn’t a special activity and you can prove it on demand with a minimum of effort.
• Be the dev DBA of last resort. We enable teams to own their schema, but we are the backstop when they fail. You have the collaboration skills and the emotional maturity to not let it get this far… you engage with your stakeholders, know what they do, understand their applications and their needs, and can spot trouble a mile away and nip it in the bud. You use the carrots of usefulness and value, and you reserve the stick of authority for emergencies.
• Govern the database technology portfolio. Be responsive to engineering needs for a good portfolio of fit-for-purpose database technologies, but don’t sacrifice operability, scale, reliability, or resource fungibility across the organization. Manage the lifecycle of old and new tech. Manage the inevitable centrifugal forces and conflicts which arise. Be professional, be empathetic.
• Partner with infrastructure engineering, ops viz and SRE to ensure that we are part of a community of technologists who advance the state of our technological portfolio together. Collaboration and value are the paths to advancement, not hoarding. “Not invented here” == “doesn’t work here.”
• Champion metrics-driven approaches to delivering a first class experience. Manage operational metrics and associated alerts, define SLOs, and be able to demonstrate both “are we healthy right now?” and “how did we do last quarter?”
• Manage software delivery through the team. Be on top of the backlog, as well as the current sprint’s ceremonies and tasking. Be able to represent the team’s work to project managers and senior management.
• Manage your overall product with a mindset that it isn’t productized if it ships without the surround sound of documentation, automation, repeatable processes, operational tooling, and a robust suite of test capabilities to validate deployments, nonfunctional requirements, resiliency, and scale.
• Raise the visibility of our company and our team through speaking engagements, panels, and so forth. Use this to build a funnel for talent and career development opportunities for technical staff.
Qualifications & Experience…
• 10+ years leading and managing a distributed software, infrastructure, or database engineering team (providing coaching, mentoring, setting goals, and recruiting talent).
• 5+ years experience with database technologies, or strong familiarity and demonstrated ability to become expert
• Specific experience with Aurora Postgres, Cassandra, Dynamo DB, Mongo, MySQL, Elasticache Redis
• 2+ Experience in software development or leading teams of software engineers.
• 2+ years of experience working in public or private cloud environments, with preference for AWS
• Agile certification and/or career experience in a rigorously-managed agile environment
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent work experience.
• Knowledge of large-scale distributed systems architecture, design, implementation and performance tuning
• Architectural experience, or demonstrated architectural chops to be able to partner/represent/advocate/defend with technical executives and senior architects throughout the organization
• Experience and familiarity in Direct-to-Consumer businesses operated in a continuously available manner
• Experience in modern DevOps/SRE practices such as CI/CD, performance monitoring, chaos engineering & load testing, and incident & problem management
• Must have the legal right to work in the United States.
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.
The Legal Bits…
In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles in locations where legally required. $172,200.00 – $319,800.00 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 paid time off (PTO).
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, 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 need a reasonable accommodation in order to apply for this position, please contact us at recruitadmin@wbd.com.
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