Senior Data Engineer

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Welcome to Warner Bros. Discovery… the stuff dreams are made of. We are the home of the global digital revolution. We are CNN.

The AI Enablement & Machine Learning team at CNN is accelerating our digital transformation through strategic applications of machine learning and AI technologies. Our current products include personalized content recommendations, contextual ad targeting, and site search – serving millions of CNN users via web and mobile apps. Upcoming releases include summarization and classification features with chat support early next year. The team collaborates closely across functions, building models, data pipelines, and ML platform tooling.

• Support content summaries, embedding generation, and classification for multiple domains.
• Two‑Tower Experimentation: incorporate geolocation, time of day/year into personalized recommendations.
• All‑Access Search: roadmap for CNN streaming content search.
• Bandit Foundation: experiment with bandits for online ranking of recommendations.
• Optimize Site Performance: deliver personalized content with caching, deduplication, and low‑latency.

As a Senior Staff Data Engineer you will design, build and operate the data foundations that power ML training, feature computation and real‑time inference for the Machine Learning team. You will partner with ML engineers, platform engineers and product teams to discover data needs, build reliable pipelines and deliver high‑quality data products.

• Design and own data pipelines and products that support ML training, feature storage and inference.
• Model datasets and schemas optimized for ML features and low‑latency inference.
• Establish data quality, testing, and observability.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate requirements into durable data products and interfaces.
• Set engineering standards, review designs/code, mentor engineers, and lead cross‑team initiatives.

• 10+ years building production data solutions; strong SQL and data modeling.
• Expertise in modern data tools (Kafka, Airflow, Spark, etc.).
• Expertise with distributed systems and a deep understanding of how data modeling impacts capabilities.
• Proficiency in several programming languages.
• Passion for data quality and reliability; comfort owning end‑to‑end systems in a fast‑moving environment.
• Comfort working cross‑functionally.
• Experience with streaming and event‑driven systems.

• Proficiency in Go and/or Python.
• Experience with Snowflake, Dynamo
  
  DB and Open Search.
• Cloud infrastructure & IaC experience, especially AWS & Terraform.
• ML platform tooling familiarity (e.g., Metaflow, Sage Maker).
• Experience with experimentation and A/B testing.

Our guiding principles are the core values that shape our work. Learn more at our website.

We are an equal‑opportunity employer that embraces a workforce reflecting a wide array of perspectives and experiences. We consider qualified candidates based on merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, or any other protected category.

If you require adjustments or accommodations during the job application process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions.