Senior Staff Data Engineer (Ad Tech Team - AWS experience required)
Warner Bros. Discovery•Silver Spring, MD
•$161,070 - $299,130
About The Position
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.
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/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.
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.
Benefits
- health insurance coverage
- an employee wellness program
- life and disability insurance
- a retirement savings plan
- paid holidays and sick time and vacation
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
