Manager, Software Engineering - Ad Server

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.

• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

The Ad Serving Engineering organization within Disney Entertainment and the ESPN organization is fully responsible for building, enhancing, and maintaining the high-performance, distributed, microservice-based Digital Advertising Platform. The platform is charged with the qualification, delivery, and tracking of Digital Advertising campaigns (Video on Demand, Live TV, and innovative interactive ads) across all of Disney online properties, including Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.

In addition, Ad Serving teams collaborate in the development of supporting components, such as anti-ad fatigue systems, impression counting pipelines, and ad experience flows. We also work on integrations with critical services responsible for the entitlements, correct pacing, targeting, selection of ads, and third-party systems.

As part of the Decisioning Fleet, you will get to own the services that decide what ad will fill the slot for ad breaks across Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, and others. You will directly contribute to optimizing ad qualification and selection to make sure viewers always see the right ad at the right time.

As Manager of Software Engineering, you will apply your deep technical knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, loosely coupled, encapsulated, and testable software.

Daily, you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems on architecture, design, and implementation.

• Demonstrated project and team ownership.

• System and API design expertise to guide team members in the the creation of loosely-coupled and properly encapsulated micro-services.

• A passion for mentoring, learning, and taking on new challenges.

• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.

• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements.

• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.

• A deep understanding of Java and the Software Development Lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Guide your team's designs and implementations, ensuring best practices, architectural soundness, interoperability, API design, encapsulation, and coupling.

• Lead by example and always strive to improve code and design for more scalable, cleaner, and decoupled implementations.

• Understanding and usage of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.

• Translating product requirements into implementation tickets, leading execution.

• Defining, reviewing, documenting, estimating LOE, and planning for high-throughput, low-latency microservices designs.

• Enhancing system observability with proper metrics, monitors and alerts.

• Conduct regular one-on-ones and yearly reviews with the team.

• Gauging team size and capacity against roadmap items.

• Drive the team’s recruitment.

• Available for On-Call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience.

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.

• Advanced proficiency with Java, including but not limited to understanding memory management, multi-threading, profiling, thread pools, connection pools, and HTTP protocols.

• Demonstrable analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Excellent communication, collaboration skills, and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical peers.

• Demonstrated experience leading a software development team.

• Experience with:

  • SpringBoot or similar web services frameworks.

  • Non-relational database technologies like DynamoDB.

  • Caching datastores such as Redis, ValKey, or MemCache.

  • Data Streaming Mechanisms such as Apache Kafka or Kinesis.

  • Cloud platforms such as AWS.

  • Modern DevOps tools such as Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.

  • Microservice architectures.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Domain knowledge in the Ad Tech industry.

Additional Information:

This will be an on-site role (4 days/week)

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA is between $167,700 – $224,900 year, San Francisco, CA is between $183,700 - $246,400 and Seattle, WA $175,800 - $235,700. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.