SDE I, Emerging Platforms, Amazon Alexa
Position Summary
Discovery, Inc is the leader in global real-life entertainment with powerful brands such as Discovery Channel, TLC, Food Network, HGTV, and Travel Channel. Our Digital Direct to Consumer team develops cross-platform experiences on web, mobile, and voice that reaches millions of users each day - inspiring them with ideas and tools to create their own unique world.
We’re looking for a software engineer to develop voice-first applications on Amazon Alexa for high-profile brands like Food Network Kitchen and HGTV. Our past work on the Alexa platform has frequently been featured as best-in-class at conferences like Amazon Re:Invent and the Consumer Electronics Show, and now we’re looking to produce the most innovative experiences in the rapidly expanding landscape of voice-first interfaces. Within your role, you’ll be working with a focused team of engineers, designers, and product managers to build new capabilities on voice-enabled, speakers, screens, and mobile devices - driving the future of digital interfaces that will make Discovery brands like Food Network and HGTV an indispensable part of people’s everyday lives.
This will be a forward-thinking role for a person who is passionate about voice and multimodal interfaces. You’ll be successful by: evaluating user interactions in terms of conversational patterns and modeling them in code; building independently deployable, reusable APIs in Node.JS using the Alexa SDK and CLI; participating in a highly collaborative, cross-functional team; and actively following trends in voice design and the evolution in natural language platforms.
Responsibilities
1. Deliver high-quality, high-performance, scalable code.
2. Work closely with other developers, operations, design, product, PM and QA to gather requirements for new Amazon Alexa features on smart speakers, displays, tablets and TVs.
3. Writing unit tests and end-to-end tests, against your code, to be used in our CI workflow
4. Participate in peer code reviews, provide and handle constructive feedback, and develop team knowledge
5. Keep current on trends in voice and multimodal design principles, tools, and features
Requirements
* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or commensurate experience
* 1-3 years writing applications and/or services in Node.JS, Ruby, or Python, with a strong desire to grow
* Experience building voice applications, especially on the Alexa platform is a big plus
* Familiarity with AWS platform, especially services like Lambda, API Gateway, Cloudwatch and DynamoDB, is a plus
* Experience with software engineering best practices (e.g., unit testing, design patterns, building maintainable code)
* Excellent communication skills in both verbal and written English
* Able to work in teams, contribute ideas and share knowledge proactively
* Self-motivated and unafraid to dive into detailed technical issues
* Must have the legal right to work in the US