Senior Staff Software Engineer

Senior Staff, Software Engineering

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 Senior Staff Software Engineer reports to the Sr Director, CALS Engineering and is accountable for designing and delivering software platforms and services that process billions of ad events daily across WBD’s global advertising ecosystem. This role sets technical standards for backend and distributed systems engineering, drives modernization of legacy components into modular, cloud-native services, and ensures mission-critical capabilities are delivered reliably, securely, and cost efficiently for monetization and decisioning.

Your Role Accountabilities:

High-Scale Distributed Systems & Event Processing

• Own the design and evolution of large-scale, event-driven systems powering real-time and batch processing across multi-billion event pipelines.

• Architect low-latency, high-throughput services for ad decisioning, targeting, and measurement

• Design streaming and batch data pipelines with strong guarantees around correctness, ordering, and fault tolerance

• Optimize systems across latency, throughput, cost, and reliability— making explicit trade-offs where needed

• Define and enforce SLOs/SLAs; drive production excellence through deep observability and proactive issue detection

Expectation: builds systems that scale cleanly under extreme load—not just “work in production.”

Platform Modernization & Cloud-Native Architecture

• Lead the transformation of legacy AdTech systems into modular, extensible, cloud-native platforms.

• Decompose monolithic systems into well-defined services with clear ownership and interfaces

• Establish reusable platform capabilities (events identity, decisioning, experimentation) to accelerate development

• Embed observability (metrics, logs, tracing), automated testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code by default

• Drive cost efficiency through architectural choices (compute, storage, data movement) without compromising performance

Expectation: reduces long-term complexity while enabling faster product iteration.

Product integration & Platform Delivery

• Bridge advanced data models and real-time systems to power monetization and user experience.

• Partner with Data Science to productionize ML models (forecasting, optimization, personalization) into low-latency services

• Design APIs and integrations across ad servers, identity systems, and activation platforms

• Ensure privacy-safe data usage while maintaining high-performance execution • Continuously improve decisioning accuracy, latency, and system responsiveness

Expectation: turns models and data into production-grade, revenue-impacting systems.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as a technical anchor across teams, raising the bar for design, reliability, and engineering rigor.

• Lead critical design reviews and challenge architectural decisions with strong technical judgment

• Mentor engineers on distributed systems, performance optimization, and production readiness

• Drive root cause analysis and systemic fixes for production incidents

• Establish and propagate best practices across global teams

Expectation: influence extends beyond direct ownership and thereby others build better systems because of them.

Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. PhD preferred for advanced expertise in distributed systems or statistical optimization.

• Software Engineering Expertise: 12+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend/distributed systems, including designing APIs and services with high availability and performance requirements.

• Cloud & Platform Engineering: Hands-on expertise with AWS/GCP/Azure, containerization/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and building cloud-native services with strong security and cost controls.

• Streaming & Event-Driven Systems: Deep knowledge of Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub and event-driven architectures for powering low-latency ingestion, decisioning, and activation.

• Operational Excellence: Skilled in CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident management, and reliability practices (SLOs, on-call) for production grade systems.

• AdTech Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with advertising workflows including forecasting, yield optimization, identity, and campaign execution.

• Collaboration & Mentorship: Demonstrated ability to partner with data scientists, product, and platform engineering, while mentoring junior engineers.

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.

Experience Level

Senior Level