Senior Director, Software Engineering

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.

Your New Role:

The Senior Director, Engineering reports to the Vice President, Engineering - Converged AdTech & Linear Systems, and leads the modernization, engineering delivery, and technical strategy for WBD's global advertising technology platforms. This role is accountable for the architecture, scalability, and operational excellence of systems spanning converged planning, linear and digital advertising, scheduling, and affiliate distribution. By driving platform rationalization, cloud migration, and next-generation AI/ML-enabled capabilities, the Sr. Director ensures WBD's ad-tech stack is positioned to maximize monetization, enable automation, and deliver premium advertising experiences across all platforms.

Acting as both strategic leader and hands-on technologist, the Sr. Director aligns engineering execution with business goals, manages a globally distributed engineering team, and partners with product and sales leadership to unify advertising systems into a single, modernized ecosystem.

Your Role Accountabilities:

AI-Native Systems Architecture & Strategy
The Senior Director defines and executes the vision for AI-native, self-optimizing data and decisioning platforms powering WBD's global advertising ecosystem. This includes designing architectures grounded in first principles that seamlessly integrate real-time data processing, machine learning pipelines, and agentic AI systems.
They establish scalable blueprints for Lakehouse architectures, streaming-first
platforms, and unified audience graphs, enabling intelligent, privacy aware
activation across converged media environments. The role drives adoption of
adaptive architectures that evolve based on workload patterns, cost signals, and model feedback loops

Intelligent Solution Design & Autonomous Delivery

This role leads the design of end-to-end intelligent data workflows, spanning ingestion, transformation, feature engineering, model inference, and activation.

The Senior Director enables engineering teams to build autonomous pipelines that leverage ML/AI for forecasting, yield optimization, anomaly detection, and real-time decisioning. They champion AI-assisted development, incorporating copilots, code generation, and automated testing frameworks to accelerate delivery velocity and quality.

Modernization & Optimization of Data Platforms

The Senior Director drives the evolution of legacy data systems into modular, cost-optimized platforms. They lead rationalization to eliminate redundancy, embed observability and lineage, and establish automation practices that improve performance, reliability, and efficiency.

Strategic Partnership & Thought Leadership

This leader acts as a technical advisor to product, sales, operations, and engineering stakeholders, ensuring AdTech platforms serve both near-term business needs and long-term strategy. They influence industry direction by engaging with technology partners, open-source communities, and standards bodies.

Governance, Security & Data Trust

The Senior Director sets data governance standards and KPIs, ensuring quality, resiliency, and security are consistently achieved. They enforce compliance with global privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, VPPA), safeguarding trust in WBD's data foundation.

Qualifications & Experience

AI & Data platform Leadership: 15+ years of experience building large-scale, AI driven data platforms, including production-grade ML systems, real-time pipelines, and intelligent data products..

Advance Distributed & Streaming Systems: Advanced knowledge of open data Lakehouse formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), distributed compute frameworks (Spark, Flink, Presto), and streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).

Cloud Native & Modern Architecture: Hands-on expertise in cloud-native data design (AWS, GCP, Azure), microservices, APIs, and serverless architectures; demonstrated success in modernizing legacy platforms into modular, cost efficient systems. Proven track record of modernizing legacy systems into composable, cloud-native platforms

Identity & Audience Platforms: Familiarity with identity resolution, audience graphs, and cross-platform measurement systems in media, advertising, or adjacent high-scale transaction domains.

Engineering Excellence & Developer Productivity: Deep knowledge of data engineering best practices, CI/CD automation, observability, data lineage, and governance frameworks that ensure reliability and compliance.

Performance & Optimization: Skilled in cost modeling, benchmarking, and optimizing large-scale distributed systems for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency.

Strategic Communication: Adept at framing complex technical strategies to C level stakeholders and influencing product, sales, and operations through data driven insights.

Industry Awareness: Strong grasp of emerging trends in ad-tech, programmatic ecosystems, ML/AI-driven data products, and privacy-first architectures (GDPR, CCPA, VPPA).

Partnerships & Ecosystem: Experienced in leading technical evaluations, vendor integrations, and collaborations with third-party data providers, cloud platforms, and open-source communities.

Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline required; PhD or advanced cloud/data certifications preferred.

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, 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 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.