Senior Staff Data Engineer (Ad Tech Team - AWS experience required)

Onsite in Atlanta, GA, this Senior Staff Data Engineer role offers a salary range of USD 146,440 - 271,960 per year plus a robust benefits package.

The position focuses on designing and delivering data pipelines that process billions of ad events daily on AWS, establishing technical standards for distributed data engineering, and modernizing legacy workflows into cloud-native lakehouse architectures to support monetization and decisioning.

Benefits

• Health insurance coverage
• Employee wellness program
• Life and disability insurance
• Retirement savings plan
• Paid holidays
• Sick time
• Vacation
• Annual bonuses
• Short-term incentives
• Long-term incentives
• Program-specific awards

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of data pipelines that manage billions of ad events daily across Warner Bros. Discovery's global network.
• Set technical standards for distributed data engineering and drive modernization of legacy workflows into modular cloud-native systems, ensuring reliable, secure, and cost-efficient data for monetization and decisioning.
• Design and maintain ingestion, ETL, and activation pipelines supporting real-time and batch processing of multi-billion event datasets.
• Optimize data workflows for latency, reliability, and scalability in cloud-native environments.
• Modernize legacy ad-tech systems into open, lakehouse-based architectures (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi) for unified analytics and monetization.
• Embed observability, data lineage, and automation frameworks to reduce technical debt and improve resiliency.
• Partner with Data Science to operationalize ML models for forecasting, optimization, and personalization.
• Ensure downstream data delivery into ad servers, identity systems, and activation platforms is low-latency and privacy-compliant.
• Act as a domain expert in distributed systems, streaming, and big data engineering.
• Mentor junior engineers, share best practices, and elevate engineering standards across global teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; PhD preferred for advanced expertise in distributed systems or statistical optimization.
• 12+ years of experience designing and operating enterprise-scale data platforms with high-throughput pipelines.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS, GCP, or Azure, open table formats Iceberg, Delta, Hudi, and distributed compute Spark, Flink, Presto.
• Deep knowledge of Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub for powering low-latency ingestion and activation.
• Skilled in CI/CD, automation, observability, and governance frameworks for enterprise-grade data engineering.
• Familiarity with advertising workflows including forecasting, yield optimization, identity, and campaign execution.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with data scientists, product, and platform engineering, while mentoring junior engineers.

Technologies

• Iceberg
• Delta
• Hudi
• AWS
• GCP
• Azure
• Spark
• Flink
• Presto
• Kafka
• Kinesis
• Pub/Sub