Senior Software Engineer

The Direct to Consumer (DTC) Group is a technology company within Warner Bros. Discovery that is building a global streaming video platform and a suite of applications supporting its network brands worldwide. This Senior Software Engineer position sits within the DTC Operational Engineering group with a focus on Cluster Engineering, a team dedicated to providing a secure, efficient and easy-to-use container runtime platform.

• Operate Kubernetes clusters, including performing version upgrades and managing critical Kubernetes components such as Karpenter.
• Analyse what changes in each new Kubernetes version and how it affects the workloads running on each cluster, including deprecated Kubernetes APIs and controller compatibility.
• Use tooling to scan clusters for items requiring remediation, define the necessary actions and execute them.
• Identify automation opportunities to reduce toil when rolling out upgrades across hundreds of clusters, some of which run up to a thousand nodes.
• Innovate using AI and improve existing processes and operations through agentic workflows.
• Contribute to the organisation's AI skills and plugins and advocate AI best practices across the wider organisation.
• Take part in cost optimisation efforts, such as tweaking 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.
• Automate the creation of new Kubernetes clusters together with the bootstrapping of critical platform capabilities such as service mesh, deployment systems and the observability stack.
• Roll out security patches to Kubernetes nodes and mitigate security vulnerabilities to reduce security incidents.
• Manage the lifecycle of critical platform components, assess when new components should be introduced, set the bar for quality and work closely with SRE and other platform teams to improve reliability and efficiency.

• 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 designing infrastructure CI/CD pipelines, for example Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform.
• Experience using Helm templating for Kubernetes manifests.
• Understanding of how GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux works.
• Experience rolling out infrastructure changes to production by following a change management workflow.
• Ability to identify which metrics to monitor during a change rollout in order to spot problems.
• Strong ownership mentality during rollouts, including stopping or rolling back and fixing problems, or escalating to management or on-call when stuck.
• Strong sense of security, always using least-privilege access and firewall configurations when needed for maintenance.
• Understanding of how running workloads on 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 honour SLAs for infrastructure maintenance.

• Experience working with AI tools for day-to-day tasks, such as Claude Code, Cursor or similar.
• Understanding of agentic workflows.

• Hybrid working