Staff Software Engineer

The Staff Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for driving engineering excellence, architectural direction, and delivery of large-scale, high-impact systems across CNN digital platforms. This role provides technical leadership across teams, solves complex engineering challenges, and ensures scalable, secure, and reliable solutions., * Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, highly available applications and platforms. Define technical strategy, architecture patterns, and engineering best practices.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across teams.
• Drive architectural decisions balancing scalability, performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Partner with product, design, editorial, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Own technical execution for complex, cross-functional initiatives.
• Identify technical risks, dependencies, and opportunities for improvement.
• Improve engineering productivity through automation, tooling, and process enhancements.
• Review code, designs, and technical proposals to maintain high engineering standards.
• Drive operational excellence including monitoring, incident response, performance optimization, and reliability improvements.
• Champion security, quality, and engineering standards across CNN applications.
• Stay current with emerging technologies and evaluate adoption opportunities.

• Proven experience delivering large-scale consumer applications.
• Strong expertise in designing distributed systems and scalable architectures.
• Experience leading technical direction across multiple engineering teams.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native technologies and modern software development practices.
• Strong experience with APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, and system integrations.
• Experience with frontend and backend technologies (full-stack understanding preferred).
• Strong programming skills in languages such, JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience building high-traffic, highly available digital products.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD, DevOps practices, monitoring, and production operations.
• Ability to influence technical decisions without direct authority.
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring engineers and raising engineering standards.

The Nice to Haves

• Experience building media, streaming, publishing, or content platforms.
• Experience working with personalization, recommendation systems, search, or AI/ML-driven products.
• Experience with mobile platforms (iOS/Android) and connected TV ecosystems.
• Experience with AWS or other cloud platforms.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience with performance optimization and large-scale traffic management.
• Experience with security, authentication, and authorization systems (OAuth, SAML, OIDC).
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum engineering environments.
• Strong understanding of analytics, experimentation, and A/B testing platforms.
• Experience driving engineering initiatives across global teams.

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