Senior Software Engineer

Description

The Direct to Consumer (DTC) Group is a technology company within the wider organization. It is building a global streaming video platform and a set of apps for a large number of networks and brands worldwide.

The platform runs on container-based microservices on AWS and covers search, catalogue, video transcoding, personalization and global subscriptions. Its apps range from lean-back TV viewing to interactive learning and run on connected TVs, web, mobile, tablets and consoles.

The company has been entertaining audiences for more than 90 years through well-known characters and franchises. The DTC engineering group is growing and is central to the company's future.

The role sits in the DTC Operational Engineering group, on the Cluster Engineering team. The team builds a secure, efficient and easy-to-use container runtime platform for back-end teams, and automates its expansion into new markets, tenants and regions.

The team works with other platform teams, manages the lifecycle of critical platform components, and works with SRE to improve reliability and efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Run Kubernetes clusters, including version upgrades and the management of critical components such as Karpenter.
• Roll out security patches to Kubernetes nodes and help reduce security incidents.
• Optimize costs across thousands of servers that run hundreds of in-house services for millions of customers worldwide.
• Before each Kubernetes upgrade, analyze what changes in the new version and how it affects the workloads on each cluster, including deprecated Kubernetes APIs and controller compatibility.
• Use scanning tools to find items that need remediation, define the fixes and carry them out across hundreds of clusters, some with up to a thousand nodes.
• Find automation opportunities that reduce manual toil during upgrades.
• Build new solutions with AI and improve existing processes and operations with agentic workflows.
• Contribute to the organization's AI skills and plugins and promote AI best practices across the wider organization.
• Tune Karpenter node scaling strategies, improve pod bin-packing on nodes, choose the right node families (m, c, r, spot and Graviton/ARM), and find over-scaled infrastructure.
• Automate the creation of new Kubernetes clusters and bootstrap critical platform capabilities such as the service mesh, deployment systems and the observability stack, so new markets and tenants can be onboarded faster.

Requirements

• Preferred: experience with Kubernetes.
• Preferred: experience with AWS.
• Preferred: experience in software development, infrastructure management or operations.
• Preferred: ability to write automation code in Python, Bash or Golang.
• Preferred: experience designing infrastructure CI/CD pipelines, for example with Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
• Preferred: experience with infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform.
• Preferred: experience with Helm templating for Kubernetes manifests.
• Preferred: understanding of GitOps tools such as ArgoCD or Flux.
• Preferred: experience rolling out infrastructure changes to production through a change management workflow.
• Preferred: knowledge of which metrics to watch during a rollout to spot problems.
• Preferred: strong ownership during rollouts, including stopping or rolling back, fixing problems, or escalating to management or on-call when stuck.
• Preferred: strong sense of security, using least-privilege access and firewall configuration when maintenance requires it.
• Preferred: understanding of how cluster changes and node rotations affect running workloads.
• Preferred: willingness to talk with service development teams about their problems during maintenance windows.
• Preferred: ability to define and measure KPIs and meet SLAs for infrastructure maintenance.
• Preferred: experience with Git and GitHub pull request workflows.
• Preferred: experience with Agile practices, including sprints, epics and stories, and Jira.
• Preferred: experience using AI tools for daily work, such as Claude Code, Cursor or similar.
• Preferred: understanding of agentic workflows.

Conditions

Hybrid work model.