VP, Engineer - Content Editorial Platform

Full Time Job
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 a modern suite of container-based microservices operated on AWS. Our platform covers everything from search, catalog, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and 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’s owned networks and brands (Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Dplay, and many more) This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to Discovery’s future.

The Stockholm DTC Engineering organization builds and owns several of the key services that make up our global platform. Content Editorial Platform is a group of teams in Stockholm and London that build services that drive our UIs through both editorial and algorithmic content curation. The services keep track of the content library and its metadata for all our consumer-facing services and provide the tools and services to make sure the right content is presented for each user in a personalized and engaging manner. Setting up experiments supports a hypothesis based way of working when the outcomes are measured and analyzed, allowing continuous improvements can be made.

As the VP of Technology for Content Editorial Platform, you’ll be a leader of leaders, responsible for defining the mission for your teams, inspiring your teams, and motivating them. You will own a set of key performance indicators, will establish goals for the teams, and will partner with stakeholders in Product to establish a product and technology roadmap.

An ideal candidate will take a hands-on approach to deliver the best product experience for customers. You will build for scale, develop technologies with a long-term outlook, build trust with your engineering teams & people from all areas of the business, and have a proven track record. As a leader, you take end-to-end ownership and consistently deliver top results in a fast-paced environment. You are a leader who inspires and engages your team to continuously develop and you take pride in seeing others grow.

You communicate effectively across all levels of the organization and are a technical leader through your guidance, collaboration, and mentoring of engineering staff. You are passionate about technology and generate a positive impact throughout the organization through your influence, drive, and collaboration across departments.

Responsibilities

1. Manage multiple engineering teams within a single business domain
2. Active roadmap management and prioritization; striking a balance between functional and non-functional requirements.
3. Manage stakeholders and set realistic expectations on forecasted deliveries; provide Level of Effort (LOE) for solutions & undertake diligence of 3rd party products/services/frameworks.
4. Collaborate with other platform groups as well as InfoSec, Content/Marketing, Legal/Compliance for larger features and initiatives.
5. Help drive developer satisfaction.
6. Champion engineering and operational excellence, establishing metrics and processes that drive velocity, adaptability & revenue.
7. Help build, lead, and mentor great software teams to deliver world-class consumer products.
8. Drive an excellent customer experience, continually raising the bar on functionality, usability, and simplicity.
9. Ensure the high-reliability and performance of the apps, services, and infrastructure.
10. Ensure SDLC processes are in place to support rapid iteration and frequent deployments

Requirements

- You measure success in terms of performance & scale of your engineering solutions and not your team size and budget.
- Long experience in building and operating cloud-based microservices for highly loaded and continuously available consumer-facing services.
- Expertise in problem-solving and analyzing global scale distributed systems.
- Very strong verbal and written communication. Can communicate effectively with both engineers as well as senior management.
- You strive in a culture of innovation and growth - willing to say yes and try out new ideas and living outside your comfort zone.
- You are comfortable handling multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
- Deep understanding of how culture and team dynamics create exceptional teams.
- MSc or equivalent in Computer Science or a related technical field.
- 10 years of professional experience designing, developing, and launching software products and/or services.
- 4 years of experience managing successful engineering teams including hiring and performance management.

Discovery Networks Sweden is the second largest commercial television group in Sweden.

We have Channel 5, Channel 9, Channel 11, Discovery Channel, TLC, Eurosport 1, Eurosport 2, Animal Planet, Discovery World, Discovery Science, Investigation Discovery, Discovery HD, Animal Planet HD as well as the play service, Dplay.

The most recently acquired principal owner, Discovery Communications, also owns the rights to Olympic 2018 - 2024.