Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Consumer Team), Hyderabad

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.

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Consumer Team), Hyderabad

About Warner Bros. Discovery: Warner Bros. Discovery, a premier global media and entertainment company, offers audiences the world's most differentiated and complete portfolio of content, brands and franchises across television, film, streaming and gaming. The new company combines Warner Media’s premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery's leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses. For more information, please visit www.wbd.com.

Meet our Team: Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) brings together iconic entertainment, news, and sports brands including HBO Max, CNN, Discovery+, DC, Warner Bros., Bleacher Report, and Food Network. Within the SPARK organization, our Hyderabad Machine Learning Engineering team turns first-party audience signals into ML capabilities for identity, audience intelligence, advertising, personalization, forecasting, engagement, and retention. At WBD, MLEs do rigorous data science and own the engineering that brings models to life: production ML data pipelines, model training and optimization, and the ML infrastructure — feature stores, training and serving pipelines, and MLOps — that makes our work reliable, repeatable, and scalable. We build primarily on Databricks, with strong working knowledge of Snowflake and AWS, and we are an early, enthusiastic adopter of agentic AI development workflows.

About the Role: As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will be a senior technical leader and hands-on builder across WBD’s consumer platforms. You will shape architecture, raise engineering quality, and help move models from experimentation to production with confidence. This role offers Staff-level scope, meaningful ownership, mentorship opportunities, and direct impact on media, advertising, and personalization outcomes. You will work on probabilistic identity resolution, audience modeling, content affinity, forecasting, experimentation, observability, and agentic AI workflows that improve how the team builds, evaluates, deploys, and operates ML systems. You will also define scalable patterns for reproducible pipelines, promotion criteria, deployment automation, monitoring, governance, and production readiness.

What You’ll Do: Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Design and operate low latency online serving systems for fraud scoring, message decisioning and real-time personalization

• Build ML models for identity resolution, audience intelligence, content affinity modeling, genre-preference modeling and time-series forecasting across global markets

• Integrate with personalization systems to consume in-app user signals

• Design feature pipelines that fuse real-time streaming signals with batch-computed features for online scoring

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Data Science to translate business problems into well-scoped ML solutions

• Evaluate new technologies and approaches, including DCR-native modeling, graph ML, agentic ML orchestration, and LLM-augmented pipelines, with clear build/buy/partner recommendations.

• Act as a senior technical anchor for the team, improving design quality, code quality, reviews, and execution.

Production ML Systems

• Architect probabilistic identity resolution systems that connect unauthenticated device IDs and first-party cookies to households/persons with calibrated confidence across WBD brands.

• Lead the evolution of Audience Intelligence, including ML Promo Optimizer, STAT v2, lookalike modeling inside Snowflake DCR, and content segmentation.

• Own ML architecture for forecasting use cases such as audience growth, demand, yield, and pricing, ensuring models are monitored and continuously improved.

• Bring ML personalization signals, such as genre/content affinity and engagement trends, into batch and future real-time activation paths.

Experimentation, Quality & Observability

• Design offline and online evaluation approaches with clear baselines, success metrics, experiment design, and promotion criteria.

• Improve feature and label quality, leakage prevention, bias checks, calibration, explainability where applicable, and impact measurement.

• Identify technical risks early, document tradeoffs, and drive mitigation plans with engineering, data, product, and business partners.

• Turn incidents and postmortems into reusable standards, automated checks, and platform improvements.

Cross-functional Partnership & Mentorship

• Mentor Senior and MLE 2 engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, implementation guidance, and hands-on problem solving.

• Partner with the ML Engineering Manager on technical roadmap shaping, execution planning, capability development, and technical input into hiring profiles.

• Represent the Hyderabad team in technical forums with ML, Data Engineering, Product, Ad Sales, and US-based stakeholders.

• Create clear design docs, architecture reviews, readiness reviews, and postmortems that strengthen engineering culture.

What You’ll Bring:

• 9 - 13 years of ML engineering experience, or 6+ years with a Ph.D., with demonstrated Staff-level scope, technical ownership, and cross-team impact.

• You are comfortable owning systems end-to-end, from problem definition through serving and monitoring, not just the modeling layer.

• You have worked on optimization problems like ranking, personalization, or multi-objective decisioning in environments with interacting metrics.

• You have hands on experience with Databricks, Spark and Sagemaker.

• Experience architecting production ML systems for large user populations, with a track record of setting standards and influencing across teams.

• Expert proficiency with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost/LightGBM, scikit-learn) and deep understanding of statistics and ML fundamentals.

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related field (or equivalent industry experience).

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical solutions to engineering, science, product, and executive audiences.

Preferred

• Streaming / Identity / Fraud / Ad-tech ML: identity resolution, audience modeling, recommendation/ranking, content understanding.

• Hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks at production scale

• Experience with real-time feature serving and low-latency inference, and with mixture-of-experts or graph neural networks.

• Published research or conference presentations in relevant ML domains.

Our Technology Stack

• Primary platform: AWS , Databricks

• Warehouse: Snowflake

• Activation: Mosaic, FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager.

• Languages: Python (primary), SQL, Scala (as needed).

What We Offer:

• A Great Place to work

• Equal opportunity employer

• Fast track growth opportunities

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.