Senior Manager, Machine Learning Engineering (Data & Audience Platform), Hyderabad

About the role

This is the most critical hire for WBD's Hyderabad ML Engineering build-out. As Senior ML Engineering Manager, you will establish, lead, and grow the Hyderabad ML Engineering center of excellence - a team of seven individual contributors spanning identity intelligence, audience intelligence, content affinity modeling, forecasting, and ML platform engineering. You will be the single accountable leader for the team's technical execution, people development, and cross-functional delivery in India, operating as a true extension of the Director of Engineering. All of the Hyderabad ML/DS individual contributors report to you, and you report into the Director. This role demands an exceptional blend of technical depth (you must credibly engage in Staff-level ML architecture discussions), people leadership (you will manage a diverse IC ladder from MLE 2 to Staff), and organizational influence (you will represent Hyderabad across WBD's global data, product, and advertising organizations). You are not just a manager - you are a builder, a technical partner, and a culture carrier.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & People Development
• Directly manage 7 ICs (2× MLE 2, 3× Senior MLE, 1× Staff MLE, 1× Staff DS); own their performance, growth, and career development.
• Establish a high-performance engineering culture: technical excellence, ownership, psychological safety, rigorous experimentation, and continuous learning.
• Define clear role expectations, growth paths, and promotion criteria aligned with WBD's global ML engineering job family; conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career conversations, addressing performance gaps proactively.
• Lead hiring for the Hyderabad team: define the hiring bar, design interview processes, attract top ML talent, and build a strong, diverse local pipeline.
• Foster an inclusive, collaborative environment that bridges India and US time zones effectively.
• Technical Leadership & Oversight
• Maintain sufficient technical depth to review ML architecture proposals, challenge design decisions, and unblock technical escalations across all workstreams.
• Partner with the Staff MLE to set and enforce technical standards: MLOps practices, code quality, model-evaluation rigor, and documentation.
• Own the technical roadmap for the team's ML systems - identity intelligence, audience intelligence, content affinity, forecasting - in alignment with global ML strategy.
• Drive adoption of the team's core stack: Databricks (primary

Benefits

Additional Information

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. Senior Manager, Machine Learning Engineering (Data & Audience Platform), 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) is home to the world's most iconic entertainment, news, and sports brands - HBO Max, CNN, Discovery+, DC, Warner Bros., Bleacher Report, Food Network, and many more. Within the Data & Audience Platform (DAP) organization, our Machine Learning Engineering team in Hyderabad builds the foundational AI/ML intelligence that powers identity, audience, advertising, and personalization across every WBD brand. We turn first-party signals from hundreds of millions of viewers into production ML systems that expand addressable audiences, sharpen targeting and measurement, forecast demand, and personalize content discovery - directly driving advertising yield, marketing efficiency, 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.

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