Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Data & Audience Platform Team), Hyderabad

About Warner Bros. Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery, a premier global media and entertainment company, offers audiences the world's most differentiated and complete portfolio of content, brands and franchises across television, film, streaming and gaming. The new company combines Warner Media’s premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery's leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses.

For more information, please visit www.wbd.com.

Meet our Team

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is home to the world’s most iconic entertainment, news, and sports brands — HBO Max, CNN, Discovery+, DC, Warner Bros., Bleacher Report, Food Network, and many more. Within the Data & Audience Platform (DAP) organization, our Machine Learning Engineering team in Hyderabad builds the foundational AI/ML intelligence that powers identity, audience, advertising, and personalization across every WBD brand. We turn first-party signals from hundreds of millions of viewers into production ML systems that expand addressable audiences, sharpen targeting and measurement, forecast demand, and personalize content discovery — directly driving advertising yield, marketing efficiency, engagement, and retention.

At WBD, MLEs do rigorous data science and own the engineering that brings models to life: production ML data pipelines, model training and optimization, and the ML infrastructure — feature stores, training and serving pipelines, and MLOps — that makes our work reliable, repeatable, and scalable. We build primarily on Databricks, with strong working knowledge of Snowflake and AWS, and we are an early, enthusiastic adopter of agentic AI development workflows.

About the Role

As a Senior MLE, you will own the design and delivery of production ML systems that directly impact audience targeting, advertising revenue, subscriber engagement, and retention across WBD’s global portfolio. You will lead technical execution on key workstreams — including probabilistic identity resolution, lookalike modeling, single-title affinity, and forecasting — while mentoring MLE 2s and collaborating closely with Staff MLEs and product stakeholders. This is a high-ownership role for engineers with roughly 5–8 years of experience who can independently drive a project from problem framing through production deployment and monitoring.

What You’ll Do

ML System Design & Ownership

• Lead end-to-end development of production ML systems: data sourcing, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.

• Own key ML products such as probabilistic identity resolution (matching unauthenticated device IDs and 1P cookies to households/persons with calibrated confidence), single-title affinity (e.g., STAT two-tower retrieval), and audience/propensity models.

• Design scalable feature pipelines on Databricks (PySpark, Delta, Workflows/DLT, Unity Catalog) and the WBD feature store, with documented feature contracts, backfill paths, and freshness SLAs.

• Architect batch and near-real-time inference pipelines integrated with Snowflake and activation systems (Mosaic, FreeWheel, GAM).

Modeling & Experimentation

• Develop and optimize models across the ML spectrum: gradient boosting (XGBoost/LightGBM), embedding/two-tower retrieval, neural ranking, probability calibration (e.g., isotonic regression), and probabilistic/graph-based matching.

• Design rigorous offline and online experiments; define evaluation frameworks (precision/recall, AUC-ROC, NDCG, decile lift, calibration curves) appropriate to each use case.

• Apply causal-inference techniques (propensity scoring, uplift/incrementality modeling) to measure true lift of audience targeting on engagement and retention KPIs.

• Contribute to lookalike modeling (LAL 2.0+) using 1,000+ first- and third-party features, including privacy-safe builds inside Data Clean Rooms (Snowflake DCR).

MLOps & Infrastructure

• Champion MLOps best practices: model versioning, champion/challenger promotion, automated retraining triggers, drift detection, and production monitoring with MLflow on Databricks.

• Build and maintain robust, reproducible, auditable ML pipelines on Databricks (and AWS SageMaker where appropriate, e.g., the identity-resolution track); enforce leakage prevention and training/serving consistency.

• Contribute to the team’s feature-store strategy — feature contracts, backfills, and freshness SLAs — and implement >

  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.