Senior Staff Data Engineer

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.

Warner Bros. has been entertaining audiences for more than 90 years through the worlds most-loved characters and franchises. Warner Bros. employs people all over the world in a wide variety of disciplines. Were always on the lookout for energetic creative people to join our team.

Your New Role...

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Staff Data Engineer to lead the design development and scaling of the data and platform systems that power our experimentation adaptive optimisation and automated decisioning ecosystem. This is a high-impact hands-on technical leadership role that will shape how experimentation data is collected processed served and operationalised across millions of users worldwide.

This role will act as a force multiplier for all Labs initiatives and in particular will support the development and productionization of the new Canvas Optimisation system.

As a senior technical leader you will define the architecture and long-term strategy for experimentation data infrastructure ensure reliable and cost-efficient data pipelines and partner closely with Data Science Engineering Product and Analytics teams to scale our platform from hundreds to thousands of concurrent experiments and bandits.

This role would be tasked with reducing Labs data processing costs by 25% over the year through architectural optimisation storage strategy improvements compute efficiency and intelligent data lifecycle management.

Your Role Accountabilities...

Scale Experimentation Data Platforms

• Architect and lead the design of scalable reliable data pipelines supporting large-scale A/B testing multivariate testing and adaptive experimentation.

• Build and maintain systems that support real-time and batch experiment telemetry ingestion feature logging exposure tracking and outcome measurement.

• Design data models and storage strategies optimised for:

  • Experiment analysis latency

  • Cost efficiency

  • Long-term reproducibility

  • Governance and auditability
    

• Enable production-grade pipelines for statistical methods such as CUPED regression adjustment and other variance-reduction workflows (in partnership with Data Science).

Enable Adaptive & Bandit Systems at Scale

• Build data infrastructure that supports multi-armed bandit decisioning systems including:

  • Low-latency reward signal pipelines

  • Feature and context streaming

  • Policy logging and replay data stores
    

• Partner with scientists to productionize bandit frameworks (e.g. Thompson Sampling epsilon-greedy UCB) via reliable data services and APIs.

• Design systems enabling off-policy evaluation (OPE) replay simulation datasets and long-term policy evaluation storage.

Canvas Optimization & Personalization Infrastructure

• Lead data system architecture supporting the Canvas Optimisation platform including:

• Artwork / creative performance telemetry

• Impression engagement attribution pipelines

• Near real-time reward computation

• Global rollout observability and monitoring

• Ensure high availability correctness and explainability of decisioning-support data feeds.

Cost Optimisation & Efficiency Leadership

• Drive initiatives to reduce overall Labs data processing costs by 25% including:

  • Query and job optimisation across compute platforms (Databricks Spark etc.)

  • Storage tiering and retention policy optimisation

  • Data compaction partitioning and indexing strategies

  • Eliminating redundant or low-value pipeline stages

• Establish cost observability dashboards and cost-to-value monitoring frameworks.

Platform Reliability & Developer Experience

• Build reusable data services libraries and APIs that:

  • Simplify experiment onboarding

  • Standardize telemetry schemas

  • Enable self-service data access

• Define and enforce SLAs for critical experimentation and decisioning datasets.

• Lead data quality frameworks including anomaly detection reconciliation and automated validation.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Serve as a technical thought leader across data platform architecture for experimentation and optimization.

• Mentor data engineers and platform engineers on distributed systems design pipeline reliability and performance optimization.

• Influence cross-org roadmaps spanning experimentation science platform engineering and product personalization systems.

Qualifications and Experience...

• BS/MS in Computer Science Engineering or related field (or equivalent industry experience).

• 10 years building and operating large-scale distributed data systems.

• Deep experience with:

  • Streaming and batch data architectures

  • Experiment telemetry systems

  • Data modelling for analytics and decisioning

• Hands-on experience with modern data stack technologies (e.g. Spark Airflow Redshift Databricks Snowflake Delta Lake etc.).

• Strong programming mindset with a focus on building and enforcing standards that ensure code is maintainable readable and extensible over time.

• Strong communication skills and ability to partner across DS Engineering Product and Analytics.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting experimentation or personalisation platforms at scale.

• Familiarity with adaptive experimentation and bandit system data requirements.

• Experience with cost optimisation of large-scale cloud data platforms.

• Experience operating global multi-region data systems.

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 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

If youre 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.