Director Software Engineering - Backend (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.

Director Software Engineering - Backend (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: DTC’s many software engineering teams build applications for the web, mobile, tablets, connected TVs, consoles, and other streaming devices. Every customer starts their wonderful journey into the world of WBD through DTC’s Partner Integrations team. We ensure customers can seamlessly authenticate and authorize across all WBD brands. We are a fast-growing, global engineering group crucial to WBD’s future. We have setup an India Development Center to better support our global streaming services and assist international teams. We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the Partner Integrations Platform organization: the services that connect our streaming and TV Everywhere products to distribution partners worldwide, including pay TV and virtual pay TV operators, telcos, device makers, and retail and bundle partners.

The platform carries subscriber authentication and authorization, identity federation and account linking, entitlement resolution, partner initiated subscription and plan lifecycle, and the onboarding and certification path that brings new partners live. It sits on the critical path of subscriber sign in and activation, so reliability and operational discipline matter as much as feature delivery.

This is a senior leadership role for a leader who manages managers and senior technical staff, sets platform direction, and delivers through an organization rather than through personal execution. Deep expertise in one specific technology is not required. Strong grounding in distributed systems, API and integration architecture, identity and access, cloud platforms, and engineering operations is.

This is a full ownership role. The organization owns its capabilities end to end, including architecture decisions, delivery, operations, and direct relationships with partner facing stakeholders. It is not a delivery arm that executes designs set elsewhere.

Roles & Responsibilities:

Engineering Leadership

• Lead the engineering managers and teams that own partner authentication, identity and entitlement, partner initiated commerce, and partner onboarding services.

• Build an engineering culture of ownership, reliability, partner and subscriber focus, high standards, and inclusion.

• Coach managers and staff engineers so that technical judgment, design quality, and day to day decisions are owned inside the organization rather than escalated. Develop staff engineers into the first point of technical guidance for their teams and credible counterparts to senior engineers in peer organizations.

• Own workforce planning and performance for the organization: hiring plan, role definition and leveling, hiring decisions, performance expectations and reviews, managing performance concerns to resolution with People and Culture, and succession for manager and staff level positions.

• Build a leadership bench with a defensible promotion pipeline, and hold managers accountable for team health, delivery predictability, and talent development.

• Establish the operating cadence for the organization: planning, delivery and risk review, technical review, operational review, and skip levels.

Platform Strategy and Delivery

• Own the technical roadmap for partner integration capabilities and translate distribution and product strategy into engineering plans with clear milestones and measurable outcomes.

• Hold near term partner launch commitments in balance with architecture quality, operational simplicity, and cost, and balance partner driven feature work against the engineering and operational excellence investment the platform needs.

• Drive consolidation and modernization of integration patterns so that new partner models, bundle structures, and billing arrangements are handled through configuration rather than bespoke engineering.

• Reduce the cost of change in a system with a large external dependency surface. Hold contract and versioning discipline at partner and vendor boundaries, and plan migrations off deprecated third party interfaces without partner or subscriber disruption.

• Ensure significant technical decisions are documented, reviewed, and durable through architecture and design decision records produced by the owning teams.

• Allocate ownership across teams by capability and development intent rather than historical familiarity, so that partner and platform knowledge is deliberately spread rather than concentrated in a few individuals.

• Resolve capability ownership and cross organization dependency questions with peer engineering leaders at director level.

Operational Excellence

• Own operational readiness for services on the critical path of partner sign in, activation, and entitlement, where failures are immediately visible to subscribers and to partners.

• Establish and hold operational practice: SLIs and SLOs for each partner facing flow, dashboards, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and follow through on root cause and correction of error actions.

• Move operations from escalation driven to signal driven. Detect problems from authentication, activation, and entitlement error trends and partner traffic patterns before partners report them, and improve mean time to resolution and alert quality on measurable terms.

• Hold partner launches and migrations to a defined readiness bar: validation in a partner representative environment, monitoring, rollback plan, named ownership, and a communication plan for the partner and internal stakeholders.

• Raise release confidence through automated integration testing in CI/CD across partner flows, trunk based deployment, and sustained reduction of environment instability and pre production regressions.

• Reduce operational toil through automation and self service, and size the operations model against real ticket, launch, and maintenance load rather than adding headcount by default.

• Apply AI assisted engineering and operations where it measurably improves triage speed, root cause analysis, code quality, or launch support, within company policy on security, privacy, and intellectual property.

Partner Experience and Self Service

• Reduce engineering and operations involvement in routine partner work: onboarding, configuration, credential and key management, identity mapping, plan and offer setup, and migration between subscription models.

• Deliver tooling and APIs that let partner facing teams and partners themselves emulate, validate, troubleshoot, and certify end to end subscriber journeys without engineering involvement.

• Improve partner facing documentation, error semantics, and diagnostics so that integration problems are self diagnosable and support requests fall as a result.

• Use partner support and activation data to identify and champion the platform investments that most reduce onboarding time, defect rates, and partner escalations.

Cross Functional Collaboration and Influence

• Act as the engineering counterpart to partner facing, product, program management, operations, security, data, and finance teams, building direct relationships rather than working through intermediaries.

• Bring partner and operational reality into roadmap decisions, so that platform investment reflects how partners actually integrate and where subscribers actually drop out.

• Represent the organization in architecture reviews, roadmap and launch forums, leadership reviews, and executive updates, communicating technical topics in terms of partner, subscriber, and business impact.

• Define success metrics for major initiatives before launch and publish impact for delivered work.

• Keep decisions moving. Time box technical debate, take deep discussion into smaller working groups, and communicate proactively on risk, drift, and escalations rather than on request.

What to Bring:

• 15 - 17 years of professional software engineering experience.

• 5+ years leading engineering managers and large engineering teams. Experience managing managers is required.

• Experience operating large scale distributed systems or platform services with a significant external integration surface.

• Strong grounding in API design and versioning, identity and access management, federated authentication and authorization, event driven and asynchronous integration, data reconciliation, observability, and cost management.

• Experience owning systems with material third party dependencies, where partner or vendor interface changes drive migration and compatibility work.

• Proven ability to lead platform programs spanning multiple teams, time zones, and stakeholder groups.

• Strong operational excellence mindset: incident management, monitoring, SLOs, runbooks, root cause and correction of error practice, and automation.

• Demonstrated ability to build organizational capability through hiring, coaching managers, developing technical leaders, and creating credible growth paths.

• Ability to set direction and ramp up teams with minimal oversight from leadership.

• Excellent written and verbal communication with executive, technical, and cross functional audiences.

• Experience leading globally distributed teams across time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in streaming media, pay TV distribution, subscription commerce, or partner and affiliate ecosystems.

• Familiarity with TV Everywhere or operator based authentication and entitlement models.

• Experience building self service partner or developer platform capabilities, including sandbox, emulation, and certification tooling.

• Experience running or closely partnering with an operations function supporting a large external partner base.

• Experience introducing AI assisted engineering practices with measurable quality or productivity outcomes.

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.