Director, Automation Engineering

Company Description

NBCUniversal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. We create world-class content, which we distribute across our portfolio of film, television, and streaming, and bring to life through our global theme park destinations, 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 premium ad-supported streaming service. We produce and distribute premier filmed entertainment and programming through our powerhouse film and television studios, including Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, and Focus Features, and the four global television studios under the Universal Studio Group banner, and operate industry-leading theme parks and experiences around the world through Universal Destinations & Experiences, including Universal Orlando Resort, home to Universal Epic Universe, and Universal Studios Hollywood. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation. Visit www.nbcuniversal.com for more information.

Our impact is rooted in improving the communities where our employees, customers, and audiences live and work. We have a rich tradition of giving back and ensuring our employees have the opportunity to serve their communities. We champion an inclusive culture and strive to attract and develop a talented workforce to create and deliver a wide range of content reflecting our world.

Job Description

NBCUniversal Advertising Products & Solutions (AP&S) is responsible for the product development and project management of NBCUniversal’s full advertising technology suite. From sales support to campaign execution, delivery, and billing, our division services both internal and external customers in support of NBCUniversal’s $7B+ annual advertising business. Together, we’re building the platform that powers the future of advertising at NBCU.

Our Data Collaboration Group, a core part of AP&S, powers the full advertiser lifecycle across insights, measurement, onboarding, activation, and optimization, utilizing various integration pathways including Data Clean Rooms and secure data shares.

Within the Data Collaboration Group, our Engineering & Operations team builds the automation and platform capabilities behind these workflows. We are seeking a Director, Automation Engineering to join this team. Reporting to the Sr. Director of Engineering & Operations, this role will build AI-enabled automation systems and production-grade software that support NBCUniversal's data collaboration ecosystem.

The ideal candidate is a strong engineering leader who can set technical direction, deliver reliable systems, repeatable workflows, and AI agents that automate complex engineering and operational tasks across data platforms for audience activation, measurement, and reporting. 

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, to support planning, tool use, retrieval, validation, and human-in-the-loop execution where appropriate. 

  • Guide the development of reusable tools, APIs, and components that engineers can compose into new agentic workflows. 

  • Direct retrieval-augmented generation workflows, context management strategies, and prompt patterns that improve accuracy, reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. 

• Agent Evaluation & Reliability  

  • Establish evaluation harnesses, regression tests, and monitoring patterns for AI-agent behavior. 

  • Define and hold the team accountable to 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, including encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance/composition, reusable interfaces, and clean separation of concerns to improve maintainability and extensibility. 

  • Champion software engineering best practices including modular design, automated testing, CI/CD, code reviews, observability, and documentation. 

  • Drive reusable engineering patterns that reduce bespoke development effort and improve consistency across partner engagements. 

  • Collaborate with product, engineeri