Lead Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN 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. 

Commerce, Data & Identity provides the core product management functions for areas crucial to Disney’s media businesses. These include initiatives and products that power digital commerce, identity, and growth, as well as those that reach uniquely across The Walt Disney Company enterprise, such as messaging and privacy, among others. Additionally, it is responsible for the data engineering, science, and products for Disney Entertainment & ESPN, along with their interconnection with other parts of The Walt Disney Company. 

The Big Data Infrastructure team

The Big Data Infrastructure team provides big data related capabilities including Spark, Flink, Presto and Hive. These workloads run in a K8s environment which was built by the team from the ground up. Our data infra mainly focus on the on-prem environment, but it’s also designed to be compatible with the cloud environment (e.g. AWS). We aim to build an open-source based, cost efficient, scalable and secure data infrastructure.

Job Summary:

The right person for this role should have proven experience with working in mission-critical infrastructure and he/she has the passion to build and operate large-scale data systems. He/she should have the ability to handle the technical challenges, adapt to changed  business requirements/priorities, think big and move fast.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Build a best-in-class big data infrastructure on top of K8s. Provide an easy-to-use interface to users and continuously enrich the tooling in this ecosystem. Make sure the system design for on-prem is compatible with the cloud environment as much as possible.
• Drive the evaluation, prototyping, adoption and productionization of modern technologies from the K8s community, to continuously improve the performance, scalability and security.
• Emphasis on automation and observability. Develop the process and tooling for CICD, system monitoring etc.
• Advocate for engineering excellence and operation excellence. Help the team establish best practices.
• Collaborate with team members, PMs/TPMs and other stakeholders to gather requirements, clarify ambiguities and work towards the goals.
• Provide prompt customer support with the mindset of customers being the north star.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications:

• At least 7 years of professional software engineering experience
• Has a solid experience with K8s, including a deep understanding of key K8s components (e.g. control plane).
• Has a solid experience with deploying and managing applications on K8s
• Has the desire to dive deep and become an expert in one or more big data areas. Ready to unpack open-source software for deep understanding, bug fixes and development of new features. Willing to be engaged in the open source community and contribute to the community.
• Has solid problem-solving skills and the ability to move fast.
• Has the ability to drive a project from end to end, including the effort of clarifying requirements, resolving conflicts, handling tech challenges and finally delivering the results.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with building and maintaining a K8s centered platform
• Interactions with K8s open source community
• Cloud related offering and technologies, such as AWS EKS, S3, Databricks etc
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) such as Terraform, observability tools such as Grafana and Datadog.
• Experience with building a big data infrastructure/platform is a great plus

Required Education:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $155,700 to $208,700 per year. 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.