Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

About the Team
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.
About the Job
The team is composed of multiple squads: a platform squad along with cross-functional squads that leverage the platform to create and evolve machine learning products.
As the Staff SWE on our platform squad, you will provide technical leadership within your squad and partner closely with the technical leads on the products squads to make sure their engineers have the data, technology and tooling they need to maximize experimentation and delivery velocities.
Here are some specific expectations of this role.
• Be a collaborative leader who makes other engineers and team members around you more productive by sharing your knowledge
• Author, test, review, and optimize production-quality cod, following best practices for IaC, version control, and continuous delivery
• Take ownership of issues and be a strong advocate for your team and the products
• Design components and complex architecture and help drive technical decisions
• Solve business problems with simple and straightforward solutions, applying appropriate technologies and software engineering best practices
• Drive operational excellence-building highly available, low latency, and efficient software
• Create an inclusive and supportive engineering culture on the team and help create change when you observe behaviors that don't support that mission
• Be passionate about software engineering, with a strong sense of responsibility for the code you and your team write
• 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
Here are some of the key challenges our team will tackle this year:
• Launch Recommendations Autofill: Support testing and adoption of a CMS component that will allow programming and editorial staff to add several types of recommendations anywhere on the site, filtering by attributes like content type and section.
• Launch Editorially Curated Homepage Module: Support testing and adoption of a CMS component that will allow editorial to curate a candidate pool and pin items and recommend from that pool.
• Experiment with Two-Tower: Incorporate additional user context in our personalized recommendations model such as geolocation, time of day and time of year.
• Experiment with Classification: POC and test an in-house (LLM based) replacement for a vended product that CNN currently leverages for content classification, so that we can improve our capabilities and expand adoption to other business domains
• Build Bandit Foundation: Partner with the platform squad to enhance data access and begin experimenting with bandits for online ranking of recommendations
• Optimize Site Performance: Dynamically deliver personalized content alongside cached assets, improving load times and enhancing user experience with features like page-level deduplication
The Essentials
• 8+ years progressively complex experience designing, building, and shipping products
• 5+ years backend experience with data intensive applications
• 2+ years of experience in one of Golang, Java, C++
• Experience shipping traditional machine learning models and/or features leveraging foundational models to production
• Proficiency with Python, Postgres or equivalent, DynamoDB or equivalent and Terraform or equivalent
• Deep understanding of common software data structures and algorithms and experience in modern data engineering technologies and best practices
• Proven track record of building real-time products for web scale that are highly available and performant
• Proven success leading complex projects within an engineering team: knowing when to handle issues independently, when to rally the right people for alignment, and when to escalate
• Collaborative mindset, understanding that great results come from teamwork and a positive culture
• A passion for helping CNN's engineering organization grow through mentorship, talent acquisition, and professional development
The Nice to Haves
• Understanding of experimentation frameworks and A/B testing methodologies
• Practical experience with recommendations, search and/or personalization

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.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-pk4be0-216-73-216-22-42 in your application.