The Senior Director, AdTech Engineering reports to the Vice President, Engineering - Converged AdTech Linear Systems, and leads the modernization, engineering delivery, and technical strategy for WBD s global 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 driving platform rationalization, cloud migration, and next-generation AI/ML-enabled capabilities, the Sr. Director ensures WBD s ad-tech stack is positioned to maximize monetization, enable automation, and deliver premium advertising experiences across all platforms.
Acting as both strategic leader and hands-on technologist , the Sr. Director aligns engineering execution with business goals, manages a globally distributed engineering team, and partners with product and sales leadership to unify advertising systems into a single, modernized ecosystem.
Your Role Accountabilities:
Data Systems Architecture Strategy
The Senior Principal defines the vision and architecture for WBD s enterprise-scale data platforms. They design blueprints for data lakes, real-time processing, and audience graphs that ensure scalability, interoperability, and compliance across converged advertising and media ecosystems.
Solution Design Technical Delivery
This role leads the end-to-end design of critical data workflows covering ingestion, transformation, activation, and advanced analytics. The Senior Principal partners with engineering teams to deliver high-performance, cloud-native solutions that directly enable forecasting, yield optimization, and monetization.
Modernization Optimization of Data Platforms
The Senior Principal drives the evolution of legacy data systems into modular, cost-optimized platforms. They lead rationalization to eliminate redundancy, embed observability and lineage, and establish automation practices that improve performance, reliability, and efficiency.
Strategic Partnership Thought Leadership
This leader acts as a technical advisor to product, sales, operations, and engineering stakeholders, ensuring data platforms serve both near-term business needs and long-term strategy. They influence industry direction by engaging with technology partners, open-source communities, and standards bodies.
Governance, Security Data Trust
The Senior Principal sets data governance standards and KPIs, ensuring quality, resiliency, and security are consistently achieved. They enforce compliance with global privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, VPPA), safeguarding trust in WBD s data foundation.
Qualifications Experience
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Data Systems Leadership : 1 5 + years of experience architecting and scaling enterprise-grade data platforms, with a proven track record in large-scale ingestion, transformation, and activation pipelines.
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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).
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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.
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Identity Audience Platforms : Familiarity with identity resolution, audience graphs, and cross-platform measurement systems in media, advertising, or adjacent high-scale transaction domains.
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Engineering Excellence : Deep knowledge of data engineering best practices, CI/CD automation, observability, data lineage, and governance frameworks that ensure reliability and compliance.
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Performance Optimization : Skilled in cost modeling, benchmarking, and optimizing large-scale distributed systems for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency.
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Industry Awareness : Strong grasp of emerging trends in ad-tech, programmatic ecosystems, ML/AI-driven data products, and privacy-first architectures (GDPR, CCPA, VPPA).
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Partnerships Ecosystem : Experienced in leading technical evaluations, vendor integrations, and collaborations with third-party data providers, cloud platforms, and open-source communities.
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