About Discovery
Discovery, Inc. is the global leader in real life entertainment. We serve passionate fans with content that inspires, informs, and entertains, providing leadership across deeply loved and trusted brands, such as Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel. Available in 220 countries and territories and 50 languages, Discovery reaches viewers on all screens and services, from free-to-air and pay-TV channels, to digital products and streaming services, to social and mobile-first content and formats. Discovery delivers over 8,000 hours of original programming each year.

About Us
Discovery's Digital group is a well-funded start-up within Discovery, Inc. We are fast, nimble, and have fun developing new, innovative, and immersive digital products and content for iconic brands. We are working at the crossroads of technology, entertainment, and every day utility. As content creators across the digital ecosystem, we continuously leverage our technology to create immersive viewing and interactive experiences. We tell engaging stories to millions of viewers across the Internet every day and bring new interactive experiences to life to not only entertain but improve the lives of our customers.

Position Summary
We are hiring a Director of Engineering in Bellevue, Washington to be the leader for the cross-platform player technology team. This team will be part of the Discovery global platform team developing a Direct to Consumer platform for customers across Discovery’s wide array of direct-to-consumer products, across entertainment, food, home, auto, nature, and science. The diversity of users spread across 220 countries within the Discovery portfolio provides a unique challenge to help develop a truly global cross platform video player platform. The Director of Engineering will be an experienced engineering leader with extensive background enabling teams & building solutions that delight the consumer. He/she will be the champion for consumer experience when it comes to video playback & player features and be a leader in advancing the use of innovative technologies to solve consumer desires & pain points & delight them in the act of video consumption.

This senior leader will partner closely with product teams, product management, Ad tech teams and design teams to build and maintain a scalable cross device player platform and collaborate with product teams to innovate on product specific or geography specific features. This senior leader will have strong attention to detail, in-depth analytical knowledge and understand & follow agile methods; adapt to dynamic & changing environment and communicate with simplicity & in timely manner. You will work cross-functionally with Product Managers, Engineers and Business stakeholders to identify new opportunities, influence and align priorities and execute against roadmap to meet and exceed goals.

An ideal candidate will be a creative thinker, result-driven and passionate about consumer video experiences & drive innovation and produce delightful experiences for our customers. This person will advocate for data-driven decision making, have an insatiable curiosity, love to invent and innovate to solve difficult problems, and obsess about their customers. The candidate will have a strong point of view but remain open-minded should evidence lead elsewhere. This senior leader takes end-to-end ownership of their work and consistently delivers results in a fast-paced environment and envisions new models that help technology and business teams become more efficient.

Responsibilities

1. Collaborate with product, design and technology teams to develop video playback experiences that delight users across a wide spectrum of device platforms in use today & coming tomorrow.
2. Play a leading role in defining video playback experiences for digital products, balancing the technical performance of the product; establish best practices for enhancing QoE and partner with product management to implement and enhance analytics, Ad, QoE & other SDK’s as part of the player platform.
3. Be the expert on existing/emerging video player technologies and techniques to enhance product roadmap and drive customer delight. Have excellent understanding of device platform capabilities & limitations and experience delivering excellent video quality.
4. Communicate effectively and in timely manner across different levels ranging from engineers to executives, and enable decision-making through use of data, intuition & analytical methods.
5. Proactively identify risks and issues and drive effective resolution by engaging different teams across the organization, actively manage dependencies and mitigate resource constraints.
6. You influence teams and groups outside your wider organization with your deep insight and strategic thinking.
7. You have demonstrated the ability to make great hiring decisions as is evidenced by the performance of engineers and managers on your team, and you are able to retain and develop the best engineers and managers.
8. Collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, on user stories, prioritization, and sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives to develop model-based solutions for product initiatives and launches.
9. Support the hiring and development of other engineering leaders, developers and other technical professionals, helping them enhance their skills, while supporting a fun and engaging culture.

Requirements

* Minimum of 10+ years of proven experience in engineering leadership in technology environment.
* Strong understanding of video technologies with specific experience in video player development.
* Experience developing across iOS, Android, Connected TV (Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Samsung, LG etc) &/or web platforms
* Experience in codecs, streaming technologies and/or Ad tech strongly desired
* Proven experience embracing open source or native platform capabilities in developing solutions that delight customers
* Drive incremental improvements in ambiguous situations and in a fast paced and matrixed organization.
* Strong written and verbal communication skills. Can effectively communicate vision and plan with audience.
* Experience in working across product, engineering, and analytics teams to evaluate new ideas, discuss technical concepts, create scalable designs, implement new models, and make tradeoffs to remove roadblocks.
* Master’s degree in computer science or technical field (engineering, electrical, statistics, etc.) is required.

* Must have the legal right to work in the United States