Director Software Engineering - Backend (Consumer Team)

About Warner Bros. Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery is a leading global media and entertainment company, offering the most diverse and complete range of content, brands, and franchises spanning television, film, streaming, and gaming. It combines premium entertainment, sports, and news assets with leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports operations.

Team Overview

The DTC software engineering teams develop applications for multiple platforms including web, mobile, connected TVs, consoles, and streaming devices. The Partner Integrations team ensures seamless customer authentication and authorization across all Warner Bros. Discovery brands. Operating globally, this fast-growing engineering group is essential to the company's streaming services.

Role Summary

The Director of Engineering will lead the Partner Integrations Platform team in Hyderabad, managing the services enabling streaming and TV Everywhere products to connect with distribution partners worldwide, such as pay TV operators, telcos, device manufacturers, and retail partners. The platform handles subscriber authentication, identity federation, account linking, entitlement resolution, partner-initiated subscription management, and partner onboarding and certification.

This is a leadership role focused on managing managers and senior technical staff, defining platform strategy, and delivering results through the organization. Strong expertise in distributed systems, API and integration architecture, identity and access management, cloud platforms, and engineering operations is expected. The team owns full lifecycle responsibility from architecture to operations and partner relationships.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead managers and engineering teams responsible for partner authentication, identity, entitlement, commerce, and onboarding services.
• Foster a culture emphasizing ownership, reliability, partner/subscriber focus, high standards, and inclusion.
• Mentor managers and senior engineers to develop strong technical leadership and independent decision-making within teams.
• Manage workforce planning, hiring, role definition, performance management, and succession for both managerial and technical positions.
• Develop a robust leadership pipeline and ensure team health, predictable delivery, and talent growth.
• Establish effective operating rhythms including planning, reviews, and escalations.
• Drive the technical roadmap for partner integration, aligning engineering delivery with business strategy and partner commitments.
• Balance partner-driven feature work with architectural quality, operational efficiency, and cost control.
• Consolidate and modernize integration patterns to enable flexible partner models and billing through configuration rather than custom engineering.
• Maintain strict contract and versioning discipline at external interfaces and plan migrations with minimal disruption.
• Ensure documentation and architectural decisions are well recorded and sustained.
• Distribute ownership across teams to ensure knowledge sharing and avoid concentration in few individuals.
• Resolve cross-team dependency and capability ownership issues collaboratively with peer leaders.
• Champion operational readiness for critical services with strong SLIs, SLOs, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, incident management, and root cause analysis.
• Shift operational practices from reactive to proactive problem detection to minimize impact on partners and subscribers.
• Lead partner launches and migrations ensuring readiness including validation, monitoring, rollback plans, ownership, and communication.
• Improve release confidence through automated integration testing, continuous deployment, and environment stability.
• Reduce operational toil via automation and size operational support based on actual workload rather than default staffing increases.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering tools to improve triage, root cause analysis, code quality, and launch support within company policy.
• Develop self-service tooling and APIs to allow partners and internal teams to handle routine tasks such as onboarding, credential management, identity mapping, and subscription plan setup without engineering involvement.
• Enhance partner documentation and diagnostics to enable self-diagnosis of integration issues and reduce support tickets.
• Leverage partner support and activation data to prioritize platform enhancements that reduce onboarding duration, defects, and escalations.
• Build strong collaborative relationships with product, program management, operations, security, data, finance, and partner teams.
• Integrate partner and operational realities into roadmap decisions for impactful platform investments.
• Represent the organization in architecture reviews, leadership updates, and executive forums, clearly communicating technical impacts in business terms.
• Define success metrics before launches and report outcomes post-delivery.
• Maintain momentum in decision making through time-boxed technical discussions and proactive communication on risks and escalations.

Candidate Profile and Qualifications

• 15 to 17 years of professional experience in software engineering.
• Over 5 years experience in leadership roles managing engineering managers and large teams.
• Expertise in operating large-scale distributed systems or platform services with extensive external integrations.
• Strong knowledge of API design and versioning, identity and access management, federated authentication and authorization, event-driven and asynchronous integrations, data reconciliation, observability, and cost control.
• Experience managing systems with significant third-party dependencies requiring careful migration planning and compatibility management.
• Proven success in leading platform initiatives across multiple teams, time zones, and stakeholders.
• Robust operational excellence skills including incident response, monitoring, service level objectives, runbooks, root cause analysis, and automation.
• Demonstrated ability in talent development through hiring, coaching, and building technical leadership and clear advancement paths.
• Capability to independently set direction and onboard teams with minimal oversight.
• Excellent communication skills tailored for executive, technical, and cross-functional audiences.
• Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in streaming media, pay TV distribution, subscription commerce, or partner and affiliate ecosystems.
• Familiarity with TV Everywhere or operator-based authentication and entitlement frameworks.
• Experience building self-service platforms for partners or developers, including sandbox environments, emulation, and certification tools.
• Experience partnering with or managing operations supporting a large external partner base.
• Proven track record introducing AI-assisted engineering methodologies that improve quality or productivity.

Company Culture and Benefits

• Inclusive and supportive workplace culture valuing diverse perspectives and experiences.
• Commitment to equal opportunity employment irrespective of gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, disability, or other protected categories.
• Fast career growth prospects and thoughtful employee benefits.

Additional Information

The company encourages candidates with disabilities to request accommodations during recruitment.

Guiding principles and company values that drive day-to-day operations can be found on the company website.