Principal System Architecture (AdTech)

Job Summary

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.

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.
• 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.

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 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.

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