Director, Automation Engineering

NBCUniversal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies, creating world-class content distributed across film, television, streaming, theme parks, consumer products, and experiences. We own and operate leading entertainment and news brands, including NBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, Telemundo, NBC Local Stations, Bravo, and Peacock. Our portfolio includes Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Focus Features, Universal Studio Group’s television studios, and Universal Destinations & Experiences theme parks.

About the role

NBCUniversal Advertising Products & Solutions (AP&S) is responsible for the product development and project management of NBCUniversal’s full advertising technology suite, supporting a $7B+ annual advertising business. The Data Collaboration Group within AP&S powers the advertiser lifecycle across insights, measurement, onboarding, activation, and optimization using data clean rooms and secure data shares. This role will build AI-enabled automation systems and production-grade software to support NBCUniversal's data collaboration ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• AI Agent & Automation Engineering
  • Lead the design and delivery of internal AI agents and automation workflows using technologies such as Snowflake Cortex, LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks.
  • Guide the development of reusable tools, APIs, and components for composing new agentic workflows.
  • Direct retrieval-augmented generation workflows, context management strategies, and prompt patterns to improve accuracy, reliability, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Agent Evaluation & Reliability
  • Establish evaluation harnesses, regression tests, and monitoring patterns for AI-agent behavior.
  • Define and track metrics such as task completion, groundedness, response accuracy, latency, cost, and failure rate.
  • Set guardrails and validation patterns to reduce hallucinations, unsafe outputs, and unreliable automation behavior.
  • Partner with engineering and operations teams to move AI workflows from prototype to production-ready systems.
• Software Engineering & Platform Development
  • Oversee the design, build, and maintenance of production-grade Python applications, libraries, and services.
  • Champion object-oriented design principles, modular design, automated testing, CI/CD, code reviews, observability, and documentation.
  • Drive reusable engineering patterns to reduce bespoke development effort and improve consistency.
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, operations, and data platform teams to translate business needs into scalable solutions.
• Audience & Measurement Productization
  • Lead the development of reusable Python libraries for clean room capabilities across first-party audience workflows and core measurement use cases (e.g., onboarding, activation, attribution, incrementality).
  • Abstract complex analytical and data collaboration workflows into repeatable, self-service components for internal and external partners.
  • Enable configurable feature deployment for rapid and consistent delivery of new capabilities.
• Team Leadership & Technical Mentorship
  • Hire, develop, and retain a high-performing team of software and AI engineers.
  • Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical design discussions, and operational best practices.
  • Establish engineering standards for AI-assisted workflows, agentic system design, reusable libraries, and production automation.
  • Promote a culture of reliability, maintainability, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Engineering Leadership: 8+ years of software engineering experience, including leading and mentoring engineering teams.
• Software Engineering: Deep hands-on experience building production-grade software using Python, including libraries, services, testing, CI/CD, and code reviews.
• AI / LLM Engineering: Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs, RAG, vector databases, prompt engineering, or frameworks such as Snowflake Cortex, LangChain, or LangGraph.
• Agentic Systems / Automation: Experience designing AI-enabled workflows, reasoning agents, tool-using agents, or complex automation systems.
• Data Platforms: 5+ years of hands-on experience with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, or similar technologies.
• System Designs: Strong understanding of production system design, including observability, reliability, scalability, performance tuning, and operational support.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to data clean room concepts or platforms such as Snowflake Clean Rooms, Databricks Clean Rooms, or LiveRamp/Habu.
• Experience with advertising technology, audience activation, campaign delivery, reach and frequency, attribution, incrementality, or reporting workflows.
• Certifications: Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification, Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate, or similar cloud/data platform certification.

Schedule

Fully remote. This position is expected to contribute from a non-NBCUniversal worksite, most commonly an employee’s residence.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Paid leave
• Tuition reimbursement
• Employee discounts and perks

Pay

Salary range: $165,000 - $210,000 (bonus and long-term incentive eligible).