Solutions Architect II

Job Summary

As television and media habits change, our mission remains true to the principles that founded Discovery – every day we seek to ignite people’s curiosity to engage, entertain and enlighten the world around them through amazing viewing experiences.

The Direct to Consumer Group is a technology company within the Discovery brand. We are building a global streaming video platform (OTT), and a suite of applications to support all of our network’s brands globally. We are building modern container-based micro-services operated on AWS. Our platform covers everything from search, catalogue, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and really much more. We build user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications. We build for connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles for a large footprint of Discovery owned networks (Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Discovery Play, and many more) This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to Discovery’s future.

We are hiring senior Solutions Architects to join our team. The Affiliate Integration Team, within the DTC Global Platform Team, owns and manages affiliate integrations for Discovery. This team works with extneral Affiliates and Partners through the lifetime of their integration, along with internal engineering, distribution, product and other stakeholder teams to not only efficiently launch these integrations, but ensure that they remain effective through the lifetime of the partner relationship.

The ideal candidate has a strong background in software engineering and has a track record of having designed, documented, and built multiple high-performance, stable, scalable systems that have been successfully shipped to customers in production. Your work and your approach to work are exemplary: you drive best practices and set standards for your team. You are able to adapt quickly to rapidly changing requirements and respond by creating solutions that are flexible and antifragile. You can thoroughly and efficiently research and analyze technical proposals, vendor product documentation, and new technologies to identify potential issues or emerging standards and best practices in building solutions. You create easily understandable system design artifacts, diagrams, technical proposals, and other kinds of documents that accurately and comprehensively reflect requirements. You are a key influencer in your team’s strategy and contribute significantly to team planning. You show good judgement making trade-offs between various technical requirements while achieving the goals and missions of product and business requirements, and you know how to communicate the impact of these technical decisions to various stakeholders (internal and external). You proactively seek out potential technical or process related roadblocks and bottlenecks and take the necessary steps to avoid or overcome them. You provide mentoring to others. Your influence spreads outside of your company and you have a proven track record of building and strengthening relationships with external partners and third parties, especially with technical or vendor contacts. You have experience successfully representing your company to its affiliates and/or partners and have demonstrated the effectiveness of solutions that have been built and delivered. You understand the level of information to share and how to communicate with both internal and external teams simultaneously.

Responsibilities

Working with internal and external teams on the design, implementation, delivery, and customer support of affiliate integrations from initial technical engagement through the post-launch phase are the
primary responsibilities of the Solutions Architect. They must have broad and deep technical knowledge and be able to use it to accurately assess the affiliate’s capability to perform an integration and ensure the technical success of the integration. They work closely with their partner teams and particularly with technical contacts to ensure that requirements are met and implementations match specifications. They
are able to critically asses partners’ technical designs and documentation and can identify and resolve all issues prior to and during implementation. They perform configurations as needed and work with both internal and external partner engineering teams as necessary to ensure the affiliate integration is working as designed in all systems. They plan and execute integration testing with the partner and assist in finding resolution to any identified issues. They provide post-launch ancillary support for affiliate customer support requests and aid in the planning and implementation of solutions for change requests, systems enhancements, and major issue resolution. Solutions Architects must have exceptional written and verbal communication skills with a background in software engineering, solutions architecture, or some other strongly technology focused role.

Requirements

• You have played a lead role in the design, documentation, creation, and delivery of a major product or feature launch, either as a software engineer or solutions architect.
• You have comprehensive knowledge of programming languages, APIs, dev ops and cloud infrastructure, data and software design principles, security, and have the capacity to become proficient with other technologies as required.
• You have experience in designing OAuth2 subscriber integration workflows.
• You have mastered the skill to balance your technical depth, product knowledge, business understanding, organizational and communication skills to ensure that the right decisions are made when and wherever you are involved. You have a long track record proving this.
• You are an effective communicator at all levels to all disciplines, from engineers to marketing/distribution to executive leaders, and also effectively communicate both internally and externally with the affiliates and partners in those same disciplines.

o Examples of technical documentation are required.
o Examples of video demonstrations are required.

• You have experience in integrating Set Top Box experiences.
• You manage multiple stakeholders and projects, in various states of implementation, effectively.
• You are able to analyze the pros and cons of several different possible implementations, present your findings to the team, and constructively argue for or against various technical approaches.
• You have the ability to extensively investigate and diagnose the root causes of issues at every level of multiple complex systems.
• You have demonstrated the ability to make decisions for more than one project or program area showing that your judgment is fungible, and you must be able to handle more than one project simultaneously and successfully.
• You have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to understand organizational and corporate goals and ensured that your projects delivered what was required to hit these goals.
• Bachelor’s degree with 4-6 years of experience in software engineering or as solutions architect.
• Travel is required (when it’s safe, due to the pandemic) both domestic and international averaging about 20%
• Must have the legal right to work in the country hired