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

Lead the design and delivery of high-volume data pipelines for billions of ad events daily on Warner Bros. Discovery's Ad Tech Team, onsite in New York, NY, with a compensation range of USD 175,070 to 325,130 per year.

Responsibilities

• 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 a related field; PhD may be preferred for advanced distributed systems or statistical optimization.
• 12+ years of experience designing and operating enterprise-scale data platforms with high-throughput pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure; familiarity with open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi) and distributed compute (Spark, Flink, Presto).
• Deep knowledge of streaming systems such as Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub to power low-latency ingestion and activation.
• Strong background 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.
• Ability to collaborate with data scientists, product teams, and platform engineers while mentoring junior engineers.

Technologies

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

Benefits

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

Your New Role

The Senior Staff Data Engineer is accountable for designing and delivering data pipelines that process billions of ad events daily across WBD's global ecosystem. This role sets technical standards for distributed data engineering, drives modernization of legacy workflows into modular cloud-native systems, and ensures mission-critical data is delivered reliably, securely, and cost-efficiently for monetization and decisioning.