Director Software Engineering - Backend (Consumer Team),Hyderabad

Global Sports Jobs Limited; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 58,000 - 94,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

A great place to work

Fast-track growth opportunities

Job summary

Warner Bros. Discovery is seeking a Director of Software Engineering – Backend to lead the Partner Integrations Platform within the DTC engineering group. This senior role owns architecture, delivery, operations, and relationships with partner-facing stakeholders, reporting to executive leadership.

You will shape the technical roadmap, drive delivery across multiple teams, and ensure operational excellence in a complex external integration surface. Located in Hyderabad, India.

Qualifications

• 15–17 years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years leading engineering managers and large teams.

Responsibilities

• Own architectural direction for partner authentication, identity, and entitlement services.
• Drive workforce planning, hiring, and performance for the org.

Skills

Distributed systems

API design

Identity and access

Cloud platforms

Observability

Cost management

Leadership of managers

Executive communication

Job description

About the Role

The Director of Software Engineering – Backend leads the Partner Integrations Platform organisation within Warner Bros. Discovery's Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) engineering group. The organisation builds and operates services that connect WBD streaming and TV Everywhere products to distribution partners worldwide, including subscriber authentication, authorization, identity federation, entitlement resolution, and partner-initiated commerce. This senior leadership role manages engineering managers and senior technical staff, sets platform direction, and delivers through the organisation rather than through personal execution. The role carries full ownership of architecture decisions, delivery, operations, and direct relationships with partner-facing stakeholders, and sits on the critical path of subscriber sign-in and activation.

Key Responsibilities

• 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 judgement, design quality, and day-to-day decisions are owned inside the organisation rather than escalated
• And develop staff engineers into the first point of technical guidance for their teams and credible counterparts to senior engineers in peer organisations.
• Own workforce planning and performance for the organisation, including hiring plan, role definition and levelling, hiring decisions, performance expectations and reviews, managing performance concerns 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 organisation, including planning, delivery and risk review, technical review, operational review, and skip levels.
• 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 modernisation 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 by holding contract and versioning discipline at partner and vendor boundaries and planning 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‑organisation dependency questions with peer engineering leaders at director level.
• Own operational readiness for services on the critical path of partner sign‑in, activation, and entitlement, where failures are immediately visible to subscribers and partners.

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 15–17 years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years leading engineering managers and large engineering teams; experience managing managers is required.
• Strong grounding in distributed systems, API and integration architecture, identity and access, cloud platforms, and engineering operations.
• 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 authorisation, 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, including incident management, monitoring, SLOs, runbooks, root cause and correction of error practice, and automation.
• Demonstrated ability to build organisational 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 Skills

• 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.

Workplace

Hyderabad, India

Benefits & Perks

• A great place to work.
• Fast‑track growth opportunities.

About the Company

The company combines WarnerMedia's premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery's leading non-fiction and international entertainment and sports businesses.