Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Search

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 bringing our characters to life, the bringing them to your living rooms and the 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.

Staff MLE,Search &Personalization, Content Discovery

Location: Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, New York

About You:

We’relooking for aStaff Machine Learning Engineerto lead the design and evolution ofML and AI drivenSearchalgorithmsforour global streaming app,HBOMax. This role will own the end-to-end searchalgorithm innovationfrom retrieval and ranking to personalization and experimentation,impactinghow millions of users discover content globally.

You willoperateat the intersection of ML, systems, andproduct, bringing bothdeepexpertisein search/relevance systemsandstrong technical leadership.You’llhelp define the roadmap, drive architecture decisions, and elevate the team’s ability to build and iterate on high-quality search experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and development oflarge-scalemodel drivensearchalgorithmsincluding retrieval, ranking, and query understanding

• Define and evolve thetechnical strategy for search, balancing relevance, latency, and scalability

• Drive end-to-end ML systems: data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, experimentation, and serving

• Partner closely with product, data, and infrastructure teams to shapeand execute onthesearch roadmap and user experience

• Mentor engineersand data scientistsand raise the bar onalgorithm development,system design,MLandengineering practices

• Identifyand drive high-impact opportunities across search and personalization

• Motivate,inspireand create a culture of experimentation and data-driven innovation while constantly striving to be an advocate for doing what is right for our customers

Requirements:

• 8+ years of industry experience, with 4+ years as tech lead experience (preferred)

• Deepexpertiseinsearch and/or rankingalgorithms(e.g., retrieval, LTR, semantic search,,query understanding, entity recognition)

• Strong experience buildinglarge-scale ML systems in production

• Proven ability tolead technical direction and influence across teams

• Experience withonline experimentation and metrics-driven development

• Strong programming skills in Python (Java/Go a plus)

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

• Solid understanding of data fundamentals (SQL, pipelines, feature stores)

• Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally

Nice to Have

• Experience with recommender systems or personalization

• Experience with NLP techniques

• Familiarity with vector search / ANN (Faiss,ScaNN, etc.)

• Experience in streaming, marketplace, or content discovery platforms

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 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, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.