Senior Director, AdTech Engineering

About

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 Sr Director, Converged AdTech and Linear Systems 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

Data Systems Architecture & Strategy

• Defines the vision and architecture for WBD’s enterprise‑scale data platforms.
• Designs blueprints for data lakes, real‑time processing, and audience graphs that ensure scalability, interoperability, and compliance across converged advertising and media ecosystems.

Solution Design & Technical Delivery

• Leads the end‑to‑end design of critical data workflows—covering ingestion, transformation, activation, and advanced analytics.
• Partners with engineering teams to deliver high‑performance, cloud‑native solutions that directly enable forecasting, yield optimization, and monetization.

Modernization & Optimization of Data Platforms

• Drives the evolution of legacy data systems into modular, cost‑optimized platforms.
• Leads rationalization to eliminate redundancy, embeds observability and lineage, and establishes automation practices that improve performance, reliability, and efficiency.

Strategic Partnership & Thought Leadership

• Acts as a technical advisor to product, sales, operations, and engineering stakeholders, ensuring data platforms serve both near‑term business needs and long‑term strategy.
• Influences industry direction by engaging with technology partners, open‑source communities, and standards bodies.

Governance, Security & Data Trust

• Sets data governance standards and KPIs, ensuring quality, resiliency, and security are consistently achieved.
• Enforces compliance with global privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, VPPA), safeguarding trust in WBD’s data foundation.

Qualifications & Experience

• Data Systems Leadership: 15+ years of experience architecting and scaling enterprise‑grade data platforms, with a proven track record in large‑scale ingestion, transformation, and activation pipelines.
• Distributed Data Expertise: Advanced knowledge of open data Lakehouse formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), distributed compute frameworks (Spark, Flink, Presto), and streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
• Cloud & 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.
• 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: 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.