2024 was the year of Max.

With launches in 73 new markets worldwide and the addition of 19.3 million global subscribers to Warner Bros. Discovery’s direct-to-consumer products ( WBD 2024 Form 10-K), the growth doesn’t stop there. With ambitious plans to expand our market share and challenge industry leaders like Netflix and Prime Video, our tech organization is rapidly evolving as we scale to meet the demands of a global platform.

As demand for machine learning-powered content recommendation grows, so does the team behind it. For those interested in making their mark in the streaming space — or becoming part of our growing Search and Recommendations team — I’m sharing my experience as an interviewee and new joiner, the lessons I learned along the way, and how I’m paying it forward to new members on the team.

From First Interview to First Week

The hiring process for the Search and Recommendations team at Warner Bros. Discovery was a thorough and engaging experience that offered me the chance to meet my future teammates and get a glimpse into life at WBD.

The Interview Process

The interview process was four rounds: two live coding sessions, a systems design interview, and a behavioral interview. The live coding rounds focused on testing my object-oriented programming and algorithm fundamentals in Java. I found the systems design interview to be the most insightful, as it centered on building a recommendation system for Max — mirroring the kind of work I would be doing on the team. This round provided an opportunity to demonstrate my effective communication skills and knowledge of backend API development. Lastly, the behavioral interview allowed me to discuss my past projects and relevant experiences with my future manager to assess my fit within the team and company culture.

Overall, the hiring process at Warner Bros. Discovery was a smooth experience, and an opportunity to test both my technical abilities and team compatibility. It left me excited and well-prepared for my new role.

Onboarding Experience

My onboarding experience with the Search and Recommendations team at Warner Bros. Discovery was incredibly memorable. On my first day I met with my manager at the Hudson Yards office, we went out to lunch, and he shared valuable insights about the company and its culture. Several of my teammates also went out of their way to meet me in person during my first week, quickly including me as part of the team.

One of the best aspects of working at WBD has been the flexibility to choose which NYC office to work from, making for great work-life balance. Other perks — such as free access to Max streaming — have also been a delightful bonus. My first day was an exciting start to my journey with the team, leaving me feeling well-supported and integrated from day one.

Getting into the Weeds

When I first joined Warner Bros. Discovery, I focused on simple operational changes as I was still getting acquainted with our service. My first pull request involved identifying areas for improvement to our logging configuration, resulting in a significant reduction in request latencies and timeouts. Through collaboration with peers, reading through the codebase, sitting in on design discussions, and studying documentation, I quickly gained a deeper understanding of how the various components of our service work together to deliver personalized homepage recommendations to Max customers at scale. Within just a few weeks, I began making more meaningful contributions to the codebase.

This foundational knowledge was crucial when I started working on a new product expansion initiative, allowing me to dive deep into the service architecture and play a key role in shaping its functionality. The broad scope of my work at WBD has been incredibly fulfilling, providing endless opportunities to grow as an engineer and make a meaningful impact on customer-facing experiences.

Fast-forward to Today

The massive scale of our platform creates complex challenges that foster learning across teams. We encourage the spread of ideas across team members through tech forums, project deep-dives, and collaborative design discussions, which have helped to accelerate my onboarding experience. One tech forum I attended focused on optimizing our “Catalog Ranker” recommendations model, offering insights into ways we can continually improve recommendation quality and inference latencies. Another tech forum covered automated regression testing, further improving our testing and deployment practices. I too have had numerous opportunities to present during project deep dives, discussing architectural updates to our slate recommendation system. As a new engineer on the team, I was encouraged to participate in deployment and on-call handover meetings, which have also provided me with firsthand insights into release best practices and effective live issue management.

Passing it Forward

I’ve also played a key role in onboarding new team members for the Search and Recommendations team. Assisting a colleague onboard to our codebase was a rewarding experience that reinforced the importance of clear guidance and knowledge sharing.

During an onboarding session, I began by covering the basic architecture of our service, providing a high-level overview to establish a solid foundation. From there, I led a walkthrough of the codebase, explaining key components and their interactions. I guided my colleague on how to test changes, deploy updates, and follow best practices for creating pull requests. Additionally, I assisted with setting up their local environment and permissions, ensuring they could work independently and effectively. To further support the onboarding process, I updated the onboarding documentation to include more detailed instructions and practical tips based on our session, making it easier for future new team members to ramp up quickly. This process not only helped my colleague but also improved the overall onboarding experience for the team.

We're actively growing our team and hiring senior engineers to tackle ambitious challenges in recommendation systems, from personalizing content discovery for millions of users to building next-generation search & personalization algorithms that shape how people experience entertainment.

I would like to thank my team members for the amazing hiring and onboarding experience specially to the engineering team.

Interested in joining the Search and Recommendations team? You can explore all opportunities on our career site: https://careers.wbd.com/global/en

For more from our Technology teams, visit the WBD Tech Blog.