Platform Development Lead

Overview

Fox TV Stations owns and operates 29 full power broadcast television stations in the U.S. These include stations located in 14 of the top 15 largest designated market areas, or DMAs, and duopolies in 11 DMAs, including the three largest DMAs (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago). Of these stations, 18 are affiliated with the FOX Network. In addition to distributing sports, entertainment and syndicated content, our television stations collectively produce approximately 1,200 hours of local news every week.

These stations leverage viewer, distributor and advertiser demand for the FOX Network’s national content.

The Platform Development Lead role offers compelling technical challenges to build and enhance backend services delivering business capabilities to frontend teams across web, mobile, and connected

TV and an opportunity to lead a newly defined and talented team. This role will influence strategic engineering direction as we take Locals News to exciting spaces.

As the team lead, you are responsible for the platform development squad. You will support your team members, provide them with opportunities to develop their career, and write code alongside them. You are an expert problem solver and the go-to person to address roadblocks, conflicts, and miscommunication. You will maintain engineering quality, track team productivity, and control the pace of software development to meet business goals.

You will understand in great detail how FTS systems work and interact with other internal systems at FOX and develop solutions with your team to help FTS meet its digital business goals.

• Collaborate with platform developers, frontend development teams, QA, product managers, and delivery managers to plan, design, develop, test, and maintain the FTS backend services with the highest quality standards
• Maintain high standards of software quality within the platform team by establishing best practices and habits
• Proactively pursue sources of requirements to document technical details and dependencies to tee up work for the team
• Advocate for solutions that take quality, app performance, backwards compatibility, tech debt and development resources into strict consideration
• Document design specifications in Confluence including diagrams where needed to adequately convert the full scope of the solution design
• Create mock responses in Postman to allow front-end teams to work on features in parallel with backend development of services
• Maintain the health and fidelity of the FTS backend services by advocating for and executing code improvements and paying off technical debt
• Provide technical leadership to teammates through peer review, coaching and mentorship
• Prepare reports, manuals and other documentation on the status, operation and maintenance of software
• Design, develop, and unit test backend services in accordance with established standards and industry best practices
• Package and support deployment of builds and releases
• Assess opportunities for software and process improvements and prepare documentation to share with team members and other affected parties
• Actively participate and prepare for sprint ceremonies, quarterly planning, meetings, discussions, and work sessions with both the development team and engineering leadership
• Work closely with delivery managers, QA, product managers, and Fox Technology teams to manage the delivery of technical solutions from requirements analysis through design and delivery
• Take responsibility for ensuring that technical risks and issues are identified and managed closely
• Address team issues quickly and directly, particularly when it comes to personnel or non-engineering related issues
• Work with the Director of Engineering in enabling an effective and efficient software engineering operation
• Other duties as deemed necessary and appropriate

• Strong proficiency in Golang programming language, including knowledge of Go routines, channels, and error handling
• Familiarity with containerization technologies like Kubernetes
• Comfortable with developer tools including Postman, Jira, Confluence, Git Hub, Datadog
• In-depth knowledge of RESTful API design principles and practices
• Demonstrable problem-solving skills
• Professional experience leading development teams
• Detail-oriented and strong work ethic
• Clear and thoughtful communication
• Thrive on collaboration

• Have an eagerness to learn new things
• Experience working within a mixed engineering organization including local, remote, and vendor resources
• Experience using agile methodologies for software development
• Competency in Terraform for provisioning and managing infrastructure
• Solid working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, distributed computing, and microservices
• Hands-on experience with AWS services such as EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and Cloud Formation

FOX Television Stations (FTS) Digital, the digital arm of one of the nation’s largest owned & operated TV station groups, is committed to being the digital…