Warner Bros. Discovery offers a robust benefits package designed to support your health, wealth, and well-being, along with a culture that values inclusion and collaboration. Expect comprehensive health insurance, life and disability coverage, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays, sick time, vacation, and a mix of annual bonuses and long-term incentives. This on-site role is based in Silver Spring, MD, with a competitive total compensation package that aligns with market experience. Guiding principles shape daily work at WBD, and you can explore them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/.
Your new role
The Senior Staff Data Engineer on the Ad Tech Team will design and deliver data pipelines that process billions of ad events daily across Warner Bros. Discovery's global ecosystem. You will establish technical standards for distributed data engineering, lead the modernization of legacy workflows into modular cloud-native systems, and ensure that mission-critical data is delivered reliably, securely, and cost-effectively for monetization and decisioning.
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 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 experience 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.
- Proven ability to partner with data scientists, product teams, and platform engineering while mentoring junior engineers.
Technologies
- AWS
- GCP
- Azure
- Iceberg
- Delta
- Hudi
- Spark
- Flink
- Presto
- Kafka
- Kinesis
- Pub/Sub
Compensation
Pay range: $161,070.00 - $299,130.00 per year. Base pay is one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package, which also includes additional incentives and benefits.
Inclusion and guiding principles
Warner Bros. Discovery is committed to building a workforce that reflects diverse perspectives and experiences. We are an equal opportunity employer and consider qualified candidates on merit without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, marital or citizenship status, or other protected characteristics. Our work is guided by core principles that inform how we operate; details are available at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/.
