Senior Software Engineer - Cluster Engineering

Storytelling is, and will always be, the heart of what we do at Skydance.

Our vision is to build a thriving entertainment ecosystem where stories and worlds are imagined, brought to life and experienced. We create for every age and audience, anchored by the strength of our content and experiences and the depth of our connection with fans. We are creator-first, audience-focused, tech-forward, globally scaled.

Here, you’ll work with talented teams that move fast, think boldly and collaborate with purpose to deliver results. We aim high, champion the best ideas and win together, earning the trust of our employees, creators, partners and audiences every day.

If you’re energized by the opportunity to help build the next-generation global media and entertainment company powered by creativity and technology, we’d be thrilled to welcome you aboard. LET’S GO!

Warner Bros. has been entertaining audiences for more than 90 years through the world’s most-loved characters and franchises. Warner Bros. employs people all over the world in a wide variety of disciplines. We're always on the lookout for energetic, creative people to join our team.

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Senior Software Engineer for Cluster Engineering

Meet our team:

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, catalogue, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and really much more. We build user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications.  We build for connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles for a large footprint of WBD owned networks (Max, Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Discovery Play, and many more).  This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to WBD’s future. 

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer within the DTC Operational Engineering group with focus on Cluster Engineering. The team is dedicated to provide a secure, efficient and easy-to-use container runtime platform. We build automation for expanding it to new markets, tenants and geographical regions, bootstrapping a fully featured container runtime ready for back-end development teams to use.

We team up with other platform teams, manage the lifecycle of critical platform components and work closely with SRE to improve reliability and efficiency of the platform.

We provide strategies and processes for lifecycle management of the container runtime environment. We own critical components, assess when we should introduce new ones, and set the bar for quality. We focus on reducing security incidents while ensuring cost-effectiveness and supporting business needs.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to, operating Kubernetes clusters (version upgrades and managing critical Kubernetes components like Karpenter), security vulnerability mitigations (rolling out security patches to Kubernetes nodes) and cost optimizations (scaling of our thousands of servers running hundreds of in-house built services, supporting millions of customers across the globe).

Your new role:

As a Senior Software Engineer on the team, you will work with Kubernetes cluster operational tasks like upgrading the Kubernetes version. This includes performing an analysis of what is changing in the new version and how it affects the workload running on each cluster, e.g. deprecated k8s APIs and controller compatibility. You’ll use tools to scan clusters for finding things that need remediation, define actions for it, as well as executing them. As part of rolling out upgrades to hundreds of clusters, some ranging up to a thousand nodes, you will identify automation opportunities to reduce the amount of toil needed.

To achieve your goals, you’ll innovate using AI and improve existing processes and operations using agentic workflows. You’ll also contribute to the organization’s AI skills and plugins and advocate AI best practices across the wider organization.

In order to keep our runtime cost low, you will take part in cost optimization efforts, like tweaking the Karpenter node scaling strategies, increasing the bin-packing efficiency of pods on nodes, ensuring the right node family type is used (m, c, r, spot and Graviton/ARM) and identifying over scaled infrastructure.

To enable faster time to new markets and onboarding of new tenants to our streaming platform, you’ll work on automating the creation of new Kubernetes clusters together with bootstrapping of critical platform capabilities like service mesh, deployment systems and the observability stack.

Preferred Skills: 

• Kubernetes experience.
• AWS experience.
• Software development, infrastructure management, or operations experience.Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with AWS.
• Experience in software development, infrastructure management, or operations.
• Ability to write code for automation in python, bash or golang.
• Experience with designing infrastructure CI/CD pipelines, e.g. Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
• Experience with IaC, preferably Terraform.
• Used to Helm templating for k8s manifests.
• Understanding how GitOps tooling like ArgoCD or Flux works.
• Experience in rolling out infrastructure changes to production by following a change management workflow.
• Knowing what metrics to monitor during a change rollout to identify problems.
• Strong ownership mentality during rollouts, stop/rollback and fix if problems occur or escalate to management/on call if getting stuck.
• Strong sense of security, always using least privileges access and firewall configurations when needed for maintenance.
• Understanding how running workloads on the Kubernetes clusters may be affected by cluster changes or node rotations.
• Willingness to talk to service development teams and understand their challenges when they report problems during maintenance windows.
• Ability to define and measure KPIs and honor SLAs for infrastructure maintenance.
• Experience with Git and GitHub PR workflows.
• Experience working with Agile – Sprints, Epics/Stories, Jira.
• Experience working with AI tools for day-to-day tasks, e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, or similar.
• Understanding Agentic Workflows.
  
  
  #Li-hybrid

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.

About Skydance

Skydance is a next-generation global media and entertainment company, comprised of three business segments: Studios, Direct-to-Consumer, and TV Media. Skydance's portfolio unites legendary brands, including Paramount, Warner Bros., HBO and HBO Max, Paramount+, Pluto TV, CBS, CNN, CBS Sports, TNT Sports, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, MTV, Food Network, BET, HGTV, and Comedy Central.

Some Important Details

We embrace 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. In line with the laws of the country or region in which the role is based, this includes consideration without regard to race, color, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship status, religion or belief, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, physical or mental disability, genetic information, military or protected veteran status, union status or any other category protected by applicable 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.