Principal Software Engineer

Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of.

Who We Are… When we say, “the stuff dreams are made of,” we’re not just referring to the world of wizards, dragons and superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD’s vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellers bringing our characters to life, the creators bringing them to your living rooms and the dreamers creating what’s next…

From brilliant creatives, to technology trailblazers, across the globe, WBD offers career defining opportunities, thoughtfully curated benefits, and the tools to explore and grow into your best selves. Here you are supported, here you are celebrated, here you can thrive.

Principal Engineer – Bleacher Report, Bangalore About Warner Bros. Discovery: Warner Bros. Discovery, a premier global media and entertainment company, offers audiences the world's most differentiated and complete portfolio of content, brands and franchises across television, film, streaming and gaming. The new company combines Warner Media’s premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery's leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses. For more information, please visit www.wbd.com.

Meet Our Team: WBD Sports encompasses a wide range of sports brands and channels, reaching over 130 million people monthly in more than 200 markets and 20+ languages. Key brands include Bleacher Report, Eurosport and TNT Sports. WBD Sports offers comprehensive coverage of major sports events — the Olympics in Europe, tennis Grand Slams and road cycling Grand Tours (e.g., Tour de France) — across platforms including TV and streaming services such as Max and Discovery+. It also manages and promotes 55 global events annually, while TNT Sports UK features exclusive live sports such as the Premier League and UEFA Champions League. Bleacher Report (B/R) is one of the most recognised digital sports brands in the U.S., serving millions of fans across NBA, NFL, MLB and more. B/R is a real-time, mobile-first sports experience — combining sports messaging and community, live stream clips, editorial articles, Gamecast, live scores and schedules — powered by a federated GraphQL platform, event-driven microservices, and native mobile and web clients. As a Principal Engineer on the Bleacher Report team, you will own the end-to-end technical direction of these fan-facing experiences and the platform behind them.

Roles & Responsibilities: We are looking for a hands-on Principal Fullstack Engineer to lead the architecture, design and delivery of Bleacher Report's fan-facing products and the services that power them — from the GraphQL platform and real-time data pipelines down to the native mobile and web clients. This is a high-impact technical leadership role that bridges business needs and engineering execution across the full stack.

• Own end-to-end architecture across the stack — from client applications (iOS, Android/TV, Web) through the federated GraphQL API layer to the backend microservices, data stores and streaming pipelines that power scores, schedules, Gamecast, articles, clips and messaging.

• Drive the design and evolution of a federated GraphQL platform (Apollo Federation v2 / Apollo Gateway), defining subgraph boundaries, schema governance, entity ownership and versioning strategy across many teams.

• Architect low-latency, high-throughput, event-driven systems for real-time sports data (live scores, play-by-play, notifications) using Kafka, message queues and caching, designed for game-day traffic spikes.

• Set the technical direction for client-facing experiences and collaborate closely with mobile (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android & TV) and web engineers on API contracts, performance and data-fetching patterns.

• Ensure Tier-1 reliability: define SLAs/SLOs, resilience patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, back-pressure), observability and capacity planning for services that require high uptime during live events.

• Partner with Product, Content/Editorial, Data, Design and cross-functional engineering teams to translate business requirements into scalable, cohesive technical solutions.

• Review and approve technology choices and designs — assessing options for cost, performance, scalability, security and maintainability — and lead design and architecture reviews.

• Define and enforce engineering standards: coding standards, testing strategy, CI/CD, performance benchmarks and quality gates across services and clients.

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raise the technical bar, and contribute to the team's technical roadmap and long-term platform strategy.

• Investigate and resolve complex, cross-cutting production issues — latency, data consistency, cache correctness, memory and stability — across the full stack.

• Drive innovation and adoption of emerging technologies — including AI-assisted development and agentic AI capabilities — and industry best practices, keeping B/R's stack and engineering practices modern and competitive.

• Communicate effectively with engineering leadership, stakeholders and business functions to ensure alignment and a cohesive approach.

What to Bring:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, large-scale distributed systems and platforms end to end.

• Deep, hands-on expertise in TypeScript/Node.js and modern backend frameworks (e.g., Express), building production services at scale.

• Strong expertise in GraphQL, ideally Apollo Server and Apollo Federation (subgraphs, gateway/router, schema design and governance), including patterns like DataLoader for efficient data fetching.

• Solid frontend/client architecture experience — able to define API contracts and data-fetching patterns for React web and/or native mobile clients (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android), and reason about client performance and UX at scale.

• Strong data layer expertise: relational databases (PostgreSQL, ideally with Prisma/ORMs) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), plus caching with Redis/ElastiCache (cache-aside, invalidation, stampede protection).

• Experience designing event-driven and streaming architectures with Apache Kafka (and/or RabbitMQ/SQS), including schema/contract management (e.g., Protobuf).

• Experience building and operating Tier-1 systems (high uptime, strict SLAs) with real-time/low-latency requirements and large, spiky traffic.

• 5+ years of cloud experience (AWS preferred), with Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, Helm, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt).

• Strong grounding in resilience patterns, observability (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, structured logging) and production operations.

• Solid understanding of CI/CD (GitHub Actions), automated testing, code quality tooling, and secure engineering (JWT/auth, secrets management).

• Excellent problem-solving, debugging and performance-tuning skills.

• Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence and drive cross-team technical decisions.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with Elixir/OTP (Phoenix, GenStage) or other BEAM/actor-model, back-pressure-aware systems.

• Experience delivering real-time consumer products at massive scale — sports, social, messaging, live scores, or live streaming/clips.

• Experience with push notifications at scale (APNS/FCM) and fan engagement/messaging systems.

• Exposure to serverless (AWS Lambda) and multi-region, globally distributed architectures.

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development and agentic coding workflows (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to accelerate delivery, and a track record of driving responsible adoption across engineering teams.

• Experience designing or integrating agentic AI / LLM-powered features into production systems — including patterns like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, agent orchestration, evaluations and guardrails.

• Familiarity with the modern AI engineering ecosystem — LLM APIs, vector stores/embeddings, prompt and context engineering, and protocols such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) for tool integration.

• A demonstrated habit of continuously evaluating and adopting emerging technologies — piloting new tools, running proofs-of-concept, and setting the bar for how the team leverages AI to improve developer productivity and product experiences.

• Contributions to open-source projects or engagement with the GraphQL/streaming communities.

Characteristics & Traits:

• Naturally inquisitive, critical thinker, proactive problem-solver, and detail-oriented.

• Positive attitude and an open mind.

• Strong organizational skills with the ability to act independently and responsibly.

• Self-starter, comfortable initiating projects from design to execution with minimal supervision.

• Ability to manage and balance multiple (and sometimes competing) priorities in a fast-paced, complex business environment and can manage time effectively to consistently meet deadlines.

• Team player and relationship builder.

What We Offer:

• A Great Place to work

• Equal opportunity employer

• Fast track growth opportunities

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.

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, regardless of sex, gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, disability 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.