Senior Principal, System Architecture

Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery the stuff dreams are made of.

Who We Are

When we say the stuff dreams are made of were not just referring to the world of wizards dragons and superheroes or even to the wonders of Planet Earth. Behind WBDs 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 whats 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 Principal System Architecture reports to the VP Engineering Converged AdTech & Linear Systems and leads the architecture for WBDs most critical advertising technology platforms. This role owns and drives the systems automation architecture of core adtech platforms to improve scalability reliability performance and cost efficiency across the ecosystem. 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 architecting the platform rationalization cloud migration and next-generation AI/ML-enabled capabilities the Principal ensures WBDs ad-tech stack is positioned to maximize monetization enable automation and deliver premium advertising experiences across all platforms.

Your Role Accountabilities:

AIDriven & Agentic Systems Automation

Define and drive the long-term architecture for AI-powered and agentic systems across large-scale AdTech platforms.

Architect autonomous and human-in-the-loop systems for deployment orchestration infrastructure lifecycle and incident response

Establish guardrails for safe observable and governed AI adoption (reliability explainability failure handling)

Integrate AI capabilities into core platform layers (decisioning optimization experimentation operations)

Drive standardization of agentic workflows across engineering and operations Expectation: redefines how systems are built and operated using AI and not just adds features.

Platform Architecture & System Engineering

Own the design and evolution of foundational platforms with strong system engineering principles.

Define architecture for core platforms (AdOps automation optimization identity data measurement activation) with clear boundaries and contracts

Apply system engineering rigor across reliability scalability fault isolation and performance under extreme load

Establish patterns for multi-region high-availability and disaster-resilient systems

Drive platform standardization to reduce fragmentation and improve developer velocity

Expectation: builds platforms that are resilient composable and operable at scale.

Enterprise System Evolution & Convergence

Lead transformation of fragmented systems into a cohesive converged AdTech ecosystem (linear digital).

Identify systemic bottlenecks across latency data consistency and cross platform dependencies

Drive simplification of system topology and elimination of redundant architectures

Lead large-scale modernization (monolith services siloed systems shared platforms)

Ensure seamless interoperability across legacy and next-gen systems Expectation: reduces long-term complexity while enabling scale and agility.

Technology Strategy & Architectural Leadership

Shape the long-term technology direction and elevate architectural capability across the organization.

Evaluate emerging technologies (streaming distributed systems AI infra Agentic AI privacy tech) for strategic adoption

Mentor Principal engineers and architects on system design and trade offs

Establish architectural governance and decision frameworks Expectation: builds both systems and the people who design them.

Technical Authority & Execution Influence

Act as the highest-level technical authority across critical initiatives.

Review and approve architecture for high-impact high-risk systems

Influence execution across orgs without direct authority

Intervene in complex programs to de-risk delivery and ensure architectural integrity

Align engineering product and business stakeholders on critical trade offs Expectation: drives decisions that materially impact system and business outcomes

Qualifications & Experience

Systems Architecture 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.

Automation Expertise: Experience automating highavailability highthroughput production environments leveraging AI and agentic architectures.

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.

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: Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering or related technical discipline required

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 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

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