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.

Job Description

Your New Role:

The Principal, Systems Architect 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 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.

Your Role 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.

System Architecture Strategy & Evolution

Define and own long-term architectural vision and roadmap, ensuring systems evolve toward modular, composable, and interoperable platforms. Drive build vs buy vs partner decisions using structured evaluation frameworks aligned with business ROI and technical debt reduction. Establish reference architectures and reusable patterns across AdTech systems (event-driven, streaming-first, API-first, etc.)

Architect systems for graceful degradation, fault isolation, and self-healing capabilities. Lead adoption of failure testing practices (chaos engineering, game days) to proactively validate system robustness

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.
• 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: Bachelor’s or Master’s 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 www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ 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

Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, regardless of sex, gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, disability or any other category protected by law.

If you’re 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.