Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Washington
Staff Software Engineer jobs in Washington are among the most active in the country, concentrated in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and enterprise software across one of the world's densest technology corridors. Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond anchor the majority of openings, where Microsoft, Amazon, and Google maintain large engineering organizations with consistent demand from mid-level through principal. The most in-demand specialties are backend systems, platform engineering, and machine learning infrastructure. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of.
Who We Are…
When we say, “the stuff dreams are made of,” we’re not just referring to the world of wizards, dragons and superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD’s vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellers bringing our characters to life, the creators bringing them to your living rooms and the dreamers creating what’s next…
From brilliant creatives, to technology trailblazers, across the globe, WBD offers career defining opportunities, thoughtfully curated benefits, and the tools to explore and grow into your best selves. Here you are supported, here you are celebrated, here you can thrive.
At HBO Max, storytelling takes center stage. We’re one of the world’s most iconic entertainment brands — home to bold originals and unforgettable characters. While audiences binge award-winning content, breaking news, and sports around the clock, our teams stay busy at work creating what’s next in streaming. From Succession, Euphoria, and The Sopranos to global franchises like Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, our content sparks conversation and shapes culture.
HBO Max delivers boundary-pushing stories across genres and platforms, connecting millions of viewers across 90 countries globally— and we’re just getting started. We're home to the most talked about shows and movies, granting audiences access to the worlds of HBO, Harry Potter, DC, Warner Bros., ID, Adult Swim, A24, and more. Turn your streaming obsession into a career— we’re hiring!
Who We Are...
When we say, “the stuff dreams are made of,” we’re not just referring to the world of wizards, dragons and superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD’s vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellers bringing our characters to life, the creators bringing them to your living rooms and the dreamers creating what’s next…
From brilliant creatives to technology trailblazers across the globe WBD offers career defining opportunities, thoughtfully curated benefits, and the tools to explore and grow into your best selves. Here you are supported, here you are celebrated, here you can thrive.
Software development teams in WBD’s Direct-to-consumer (DTC) division build and deliver applications and services powering the customer experience of products such as HBO MAX, Discovery+, Bleacher Report, TNT etc., which run on connected TVs, set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, consoles, PCs, and other streaming devices.
The Delivery & Deploy team within Release and Delivery Engineering owns the final leg of WBD's software delivery platform — the pipelines, tooling, and automation that take software from a passing build to a safe production release. We serve 2,000+ engineers across DTC's streaming products, providing a simple, reliable path to production built on modern practices that emphasize testability, repeatability, and self-service automation.
Your New Role
You are a technically broad Staff engineer who takes complex, ambiguous platform problems from design to production. You've built and operated the infrastructure that lets thousands of engineers ship software safely — CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, deployment automation, and release tooling — and you've led the cross-org technical conversations that made adoption stick.
You don't just build for your immediate team.
You develop working architectures, write the design docs that align stakeholders, break down the work for your team, and mentor engineers from concept through delivery. You've owned systems end to end: from the first diagram on a whiteboard to the runbook that keeps it running at 2 AM.
You're as effective influencing direction with leadership as you are reviewing a pull request. Your breadth — spanning build systems, delivery pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling — lets you connect dots that specialists miss and make better tradeoffs because you understand the full picture.
You are judged as much on the positive impact you have on engineers around you as on your own output.
Your Role Accountabilities
Drive technical direction across delivery and deployment platform capabilities: setting the architectural roadmap, making build-vs-extend decisions, and ensuring the platform evolves to meet growing scale and organizational needs.
Lead design-to-production on complex, cross-team initiatives — authoring design documents, running technical alignment across stakeholder groups, and owning delivery through to production readiness.
Own critical platform programs — including resilience and disaster recovery planning for CI/CD infrastructure, and driving adoption of automated release safety mechanisms across engineering teams.
Build and evolve CI/CD tooling — pipelines, build systems, artifact management, release automation, and developer-facing interfaces that give engineering teams self-service control over how their software is built and shipped.
Establish operational excellence standards: on-call practices, incident response playbooks, gameday facilitation, and the documentation culture that makes hard systems understandable.
Mentor engineers on the team — reviewing designs, pairing on hard problems, and modeling what Senior and Staff-level ownership looks like.
Represent the team in cross-org technical forums, vendor relationships, and architecture review processes.
Qualifications & Experience
5+ years of experience leading the technical direction of complex systems, involving yourself and other engineers. You make good decisions on architecture, know when to build new vs. extend existing, and are persuasive in delivering your recommendations to teams and stakeholders through data and facts.
Demonstrated ability to take projects from ambiguous problem statement through architecture, stakeholder alignment, implementation, and production deployment — without needing someone to break it down for you.
Track record of cross-team technical influence: you've driven adoption of platform capabilities across engineering organizations that didn't report to you.
Strong communicator: your design docs are clear, your technical presentations land with non-technical audiences, and your code reviews leave engineers better than you found them.
5+ years building and operating CI/CD systems, with depth on both the build (CI) and deployment (CD) sides of the lifecycle.
5+ years with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or comparable systems — including designing reusable pipeline patterns and enforcing organizational standards at scale.
3+ years hands-on with build systems (e.g. Gradle, Maven, Bazel, npm/yarn, Rush, Make) and a solid understanding of dependency trees, reproducible builds, and build performance at scale.
Experience with artifact management platforms (JFrog Artifactory, ECR, or equivalent) — lifecycle policies, repository governance, access control, and artifact promotion across environments.
5+ years with AWS, including EKS, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, and networking. Strong understanding of how cloud services compose into production-grade delivery infrastructure.
3+ years with IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation) — not just authoring templates but designing reusable, maintainable infrastructure patterns.
5+ years hands-on with Kubernetes (K8s / AWS EKS), including deployment lifecycle management, rollout strategies, workload identity, and cluster-level troubleshooting.
5+ years as a software developer using at least one of: Go/TypeScript (strongly preferred), Kotlin/Java, or Python. Solid command of how applications are structured, built, and operated in production.
Strong CS fundamentals and a track record of implementing highly reliable automation and tooling.
Experience managing GitHub at organizational scale — Actions workflows, org-level policies, OIDC / federated identity integration, and security controls.
Operational experience: on-call rotations, incident response, postmortem facilitation, playbook authoring, and gameday execution.
2+ years collaborating with remote teams across geographies and time zones.
Excellent written communication skills with particular emphasis on technical documentation and architecture diagrams.
Good to Have
Experience with progressive delivery patterns: canary releases, blue/green deployments, automated rollback triggers.
Observability experience in a delivery context: using metrics, traces, and logs to understand pipeline health, failure rates, and developer experience at scale. Hands-on experience with Prometheus and Grafana to instrument, observe, and alert on platform metrics.
Exposure to developer experience measurement — DORA metrics, deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate.
Experience with serverless/Lambda platform patterns on AWS.
How We Get Things Done...
Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.
Championing Inclusion at WBD
Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of our society and the world around us. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, regardless of sex, gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, disability, or any other category protected by law.
If you're a qualified candidate and require adjustments or accommodation to search for a job opening or apply for a position, please contact us at recruitadmin@wbd.com.
How We Get Things Done…
This last bit is probably the most important! Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.
Championing Inclusion at WBD
Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.If you’re a qualified candidate with a disability and you require adjustments or accommodations during the job application and/or recruitment process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions to submit your request.
In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles in locations where legally required. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors, including but not limited to external market data, internal equity, location, skill set, experience, and/or performance. Base pay is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $165,690.00 - $307,710.00 salary per year. Other rewards may include annual bonuses, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. In addition, Warner Bros. Discovery provides a variety of benefits to employees, including health insurance coverage, an employee wellness program, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and sick time and vacation.Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of.
Who We Are…
When we say, “the stuff dreams are made of,” we’re not just referring to the world of wizards, dragons and superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD’s vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellers bringing our characters to life, the creators bringing them to your living rooms and the dreamers creating what’s next…
From brilliant creatives, to technology trailblazers, across the globe, WBD offers career defining opportunities, thoughtfully curated benefits, and the tools to explore and grow into your best selves. Here you are supported, here you are celebrated, here you can thrive.
At HBO Max, storytelling takes center stage. We’re one of the world’s most iconic entertainment brands — home to bold originals and unforgettable characters. While audiences binge award-winning content, breaking news, and sports around the clock, our teams stay busy at work creating what’s next in streaming. From Succession, Euphoria, and The Sopranos to global franchises like Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, our content sparks conversation and shapes culture.
HBO Max delivers boundary-pushing stories across genres and platforms, connecting millions of viewers across 90 countries globally— and we’re just getting started. We're home to the most talked about shows and movies, granting audiences access to the worlds of HBO, Harry Potter, DC, Warner Bros., ID, Adult Swim, A24, and more. Turn your streaming obsession into a career— we’re hiring!
Who We Are...
When we say, “the stuff dreams are made of,” we’re not just referring to the world of wizards, dragons and superheroes, or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBD’s vast portfolio of iconic content and beloved brands, are the storytellers bringing our characters to life, the creators bringing them to your living rooms and the dreamers creating what’s next…
From brilliant creatives to technology trailblazers across the globe WBD offers career defining opportunities, thoughtfully curated benefits, and the tools to explore and grow into your best selves. Here you are supported, here you are celebrated, here you can thrive.
Software development teams in WBD’s Direct-to-consumer (DTC) division build and deliver applications and services powering the customer experience of products such as HBO MAX, Discovery+, Bleacher Report, TNT etc., which run on connected TVs, set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, consoles, PCs, and other streaming devices.
The Delivery & Deploy team within Release and Delivery Engineering owns the final leg of WBD's software delivery platform — the pipelines, tooling, and automation that take software from a passing build to a safe production release. We serve 2,000+ engineers across DTC's streaming products, providing a simple, reliable path to production built on modern practices that emphasize testability, repeatability, and self-service automation.
Your New Role
You are a technically broad Staff engineer who takes complex, ambiguous platform problems from design to production. You've built and operated the infrastructure that lets thousands of engineers ship software safely — CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, deployment automation, and release tooling — and you've led the cross-org technical conversations that made adoption stick.
You don't just build for your immediate team.
You develop working architectures, write the design docs that align stakeholders, break down the work for your team, and mentor engineers from concept through delivery. You've owned systems end to end: from the first diagram on a whiteboard to the runbook that keeps it running at 2 AM.
You're as effective influencing direction with leadership as you are reviewing a pull request. Your breadth — spanning build systems, delivery pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling — lets you connect dots that specialists miss and make better tradeoffs because you understand the full picture.
You are judged as much on the positive impact you have on engineers around you as on your own output.
Your Role Accountabilities
Drive technical direction across delivery and deployment platform capabilities: setting the architectural roadmap, making build-vs-extend decisions, and ensuring the platform evolves to meet growing scale and organizational needs.
Lead design-to-production on complex, cross-team initiatives — authoring design documents, running technical alignment across stakeholder groups, and owning delivery through to production readiness.
Own critical platform programs — including resilience and disaster recovery planning for CI/CD infrastructure, and driving adoption of automated release safety mechanisms across engineering teams.
Build and evolve CI/CD tooling — pipelines, build systems, artifact management, release automation, and developer-facing interfaces that give engineering teams self-service control over how their software is built and shipped.
Establish operational excellence standards: on-call practices, incident response playbooks, gameday facilitation, and the documentation culture that makes hard systems understandable.
Mentor engineers on the team — reviewing designs, pairing on hard problems, and modeling what Senior and Staff-level ownership looks like.
Represent the team in cross-org technical forums, vendor relationships, and architecture review processes.
Qualifications & Experience
5+ years of experience leading the technical direction of complex systems, involving yourself and other engineers. You make good decisions on architecture, know when to build new vs. extend existing, and are persuasive in delivering your recommendations to teams and stakeholders through data and facts.
Demonstrated ability to take projects from ambiguous problem statement through architecture, stakeholder alignment, implementation, and production deployment — without needing someone to break it down for you.
Track record of cross-team technical influence: you've driven adoption of platform capabilities across engineering organizations that didn't report to you.
Strong communicator: your design docs are clear, your technical presentations land with non-technical audiences, and your code reviews leave engineers better than you found them.
5+ years building and operating CI/CD systems, with depth on both the build (CI) and deployment (CD) sides of the lifecycle.
5+ years with CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or comparable systems — including designing reusable pipeline patterns and enforcing organizational standards at scale.
3+ years hands-on with build systems (e.g. Gradle, Maven, Bazel, npm/yarn, Rush, Make) and a solid understanding of dependency trees, reproducible builds, and build performance at scale.
Experience with artifact management platforms (JFrog Artifactory, ECR, or equivalent) — lifecycle policies, repository governance, access control, and artifact promotion across environments.
5+ years with AWS, including EKS, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, and networking. Strong understanding of how cloud services compose into production-grade delivery infrastructure.
3+ years with IaC tools (CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation) — not just authoring templates but designing reusable, maintainable infrastructure patterns.
5+ years hands-on with Kubernetes (K8s / AWS EKS), including deployment lifecycle management, rollout strategies, workload identity, and cluster-level troubleshooting.
5+ years as a software developer using at least one of: Go/TypeScript (strongly preferred), Kotlin/Java, or Python. Solid command of how applications are structured, built, and operated in production.
Strong CS fundamentals and a track record of implementing highly reliable automation and tooling.
Experience managing GitHub at organizational scale — Actions workflows, org-level policies, OIDC / federated identity integration, and security controls.
Operational experience: on-call rotations, incident response, postmortem facilitation, playbook authoring, and gameday execution.
2+ years collaborating with remote teams across geographies and time zones.
Excellent written communication skills with particular emphasis on technical documentation and architecture diagrams.
Good to Have
Experience with progressive delivery patterns: canary releases, blue/green deployments, automated rollback triggers.
Observability experience in a delivery context: using metrics, traces, and logs to understand pipeline health, failure rates, and developer experience at scale. Hands-on experience with Prometheus and Grafana to instrument, observe, and alert on platform metrics.
Exposure to developer experience measurement — DORA metrics, deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate.
Experience with serverless/Lambda platform patterns on AWS.
How We Get Things Done...
Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.
Championing Inclusion at WBD
Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of our society and the world around us. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, regardless of sex, gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, disability, or any other category protected by law.
If you're a qualified candidate and require adjustments or accommodation to search for a job opening or apply for a position, please contact us at recruitadmin@wbd.com.
How We Get Things Done…
This last bit is probably the most important! Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.
Championing Inclusion at WBD
Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.If you’re a qualified candidate with a disability and you require adjustments or accommodations during the job application and/or recruitment process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions to submit your request.
In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles in locations where legally required. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors, including but not limited to external market data, internal equity, location, skill set, experience, and/or performance. Base pay is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $165,690.00 - $307,710.00 salary per year. Other rewards may include annual bonuses, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. In addition, Warner Bros. Discovery provides a variety of benefits to employees, including health insurance coverage, an employee wellness program, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and sick time and vacation.See All 96 Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Washington
Find roles in Washington that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Staff Software Engineer JobsStaff Software Engineer Jobs by City in Washington
Where Washington roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Staff Software Engineer Job Market in Washington
A snapshot from current Washington openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Google17
- Rippling8
- Anthropic6
- LinkedIn4
- UKG3
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software34
- Science & Research6
- Investment & Asset Management6
- Banking & Financial Services4
- Retail3
What Washington Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in staff software engineer jobs across Washington.
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related technical field
- Seven or more years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership
- Deep proficiency in one or more languages such as Java, Go, Python, C++, or Rust
- Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud-native architectures
- Ability to lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive cross-team alignment on complex projects
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and modern DevOps practices
Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Washington: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a staff software engineer in Washington?
Staff software engineer is an experience-based title with no state-issued license or registration required in Washington. Most engineers reach the level after several years in senior engineering roles, demonstrating ownership of large systems and the ability to influence technical direction across teams. Washington's concentration of large technology employers means promotion often happens internally, with companies like Microsoft and Amazon running structured career ladders that define the staff level explicitly. A strong portfolio of systems work and cross-functional leadership experience carries the most weight.
How much do staff software engineers make in Washington?
Staff software engineers in Washington earn a median of about $166,540 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $96,810 for the lowest 10% to over $255,350 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire staff software engineers in Washington?
Employers hiring staff software engineers in Washington right now include Google, Rippling, and Anthropic, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of August 2026. Washington's technology sector runs deep beyond the largest names, with aerospace companies, enterprise software firms, and cloud services providers across the Seattle metro also posting staff-level openings regularly.
Which Washington cities have the most staff software engineer jobs?
Seattle, Bellevue, and Kirkland have the most staff software engineer openings in Washington. Seattle and Bellevue drive the bulk of demand through headquarters and major engineering hubs for cloud and enterprise technology companies, while Redmond's concentration of Microsoft campuses anchors a substantial share of roles on the Eastside, making the greater Seattle metro the clear center of gravity for this level in Washington.
Are there remote staff software engineer jobs in Washington?
Yes, and more than most fields. About 52% of staff software engineer openings tied to Washington are remote or hybrid as of August 2026, reflecting how thoroughly this role translates to distributed work. Platform engineering, backend infrastructure, and architecture-focused positions tend to be the most remote-eligible, while roles involving close collaboration on hardware integrations or on-site lab systems are more likely to require in-person presence.
How can I get hired as a staff software engineer in Washington with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is through an associate or junior software engineer role, not directly into the staff level. Amazon and Microsoft both run structured university and new-graduate hiring programs in Washington that place candidates into entry-level engineering positions with defined growth tracks. Building proficiency in cloud platforms, contributing to open-source projects, and moving laterally from roles in quality assurance or technical program management are concrete ways to accumulate the systems experience Washington employers look for when evaluating candidates for senior and eventually staff positions.
Where can I find and apply to staff software engineer jobs in Washington?
You can find and apply to staff software engineer jobs in Washington on Migrate Mate, which lists current openings from employers hiring in the state right now. Find the roles that fit your experience and apply directly.
See All 96 Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Washington
Find roles in Washington that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Staff Software Engineer Jobs