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,” 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 Principal, Systems Automation reports to the Sr Director, Application Engineering – Converged AdTech & Linear Systems and leads the architecture for WBD’s 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 WBD’s ad-tech stack is positioned to maximize monetization, enable automation, and deliver premium advertising experiences across all platforms.

Accountabilities: ‑ Driven & Agentic Systems Automation:  Lead the design and implementation of enterprise ‑ scale automation leveraging AI and agentic architectures, including autonomous and human ‑ in ‑ the ‑ loop agents that orchestrate deployments, infrastructure lifecycle management, incident response, and operational workflows across large ‑ scale adtech systems, with strong focus on reliability, governance, observability, and measurable efficiency gains. Solution Design & Technical Delivery Partner with product, data science, infrastructure, privacy, and platform teams to ensure architecture aligns with business, regulatory, and performance requirements. Identify and resolve architectural bottlenecks impacting scale, latency, throughput, and availability Engineering Execution Review and approve high‑impact design decisions; provide hands-on technical leadership for complex initiatives. Influence engineering execution without direct authority through technical credibility and clear communication Innovation and mentorship Mentor senior engineers and architects on system design and tradeoff analysis. Evaluate and introduce technologies related to streaming, storage, orchestration, observability, and resiliency 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 high ‑ availability, high ‑ throughput 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. ·