Senior Staff Data Engineer (Ad Tech Team - AWS experience required)

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver data pipelines that process billions of ad events daily across WBD’s global ecosystem.
• Set technical standards for distributed data engineering, drive modernization of legacy workflows into modular cloud-native systems, and ensure mission-critical data is delivered reliably, securely, and cost-efficiently for monetization and decisioning.
• Build and maintain ingestion, ETL, and activation pipelines supporting real-time and batch processing of multi-billion event datasets.
• Optimize data workflows for latency, reliability, and scalability in cloud-native environments.
• Modernize legacy ad-tech systems into open, lakehouse-based architectures (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi) for unified analytics and monetization.
• Embed observability, data lineage, and automation frameworks to reduce technical debt and improve resiliency.
• Partner with Data Science to operationalize ML models for forecasting, optimization, and personalization.
• Ensure downstream data delivery into ad servers, identity systems, and activation platforms is low-latency and privacy-compliant.
• Act as a domain expert in distributed systems, streaming, and big data engineering.
• Mentor junior engineers, share best practices, and elevate engineering standards across global teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; PhD preferred for advanced expertise in distributed systems or statistical optimization.
• 12+ years of experience designing and operating enterprise-scale data platforms with high-throughput pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure, open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), and distributed compute (Spark, Flink, Presto).
• Deep knowledge of Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub for powering low-latency ingestion and activation.
• Skilled in CI/CD, automation, observability, and governance frameworks for enterprise-grade data engineering.
• Familiarity with advertising workflows including forecasting, yield optimization, identity, and campaign execution.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with data scientists, product teams, and platform engineering while mentoring junior engineers.

Technologies

• Iceberg
• Delta
• Hudi
• AWS
• GCP
• Azure
• Spark
• Flink
• Presto
• Kafka
• Kinesis
• Pub/Sub

Benefits

• Health insurance coverage
• Employee wellness program
• Life and disability insurance
• Retirement savings plan
• Paid holidays
• Sick time
• Vacation
• Annual bonuses
• Short-term incentives
• Long-term incentives
• Program-specific awards