Sr Principal, System Architecture (Digital AdTech)

Role overview

Sr Principal, System Architecture (Digital AdTech) at Warner Bros. Discovery

This role owns and drives the systems automation architecture of core adtech platforms to improve scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across the ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Drive standardization of agentic workflows across engineering and operations.
• Lead transformation of fragmented systems into a cohesive, converged AdTech ecosystem (linear + digital).
• Drive simplification of system topology and elimination of redundant architectures.
• Ensure seamless interoperability across legacy and next-gen systems.
• Evaluate emerging technologies (streaming, distributed systems, AI infra, Agentic AI, privacy tech) for strategic adoption.
• Review and approve architecture for high-impact, high-risk systems.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline required.
• Championing Inclusion at WBD.

Employment details

• Location: Hyderabad [Telangāna] [India]

Application details

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

Additional role details

• The Senior Principal, System Architecture reports to the VP Engineering, Converged AdTech & Linear Systems and leads the architecture for WBD’s most critical advertising technology platforms.
• 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.
• AI‑Driven & 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).
• Expectation: redefines how systems are built and operated using AI and not just adds features.
• 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.
• Establish patterns for multi-region, high-availability, and disaster-resilient systems.
• Drive platform standardization to reduce fragmentation and improve developer velocity.
• Identify systemic bottlenecks across latency, data consistency, and cross-platform dependencies.
• Shape the long-term technology direction and elevate architectural capability across the organization.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.