Lead Software Engineer - ESPN+

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:

1. 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.

2. 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. 

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

Job Summary:

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

This Lead Software Engineer, Personalization and Recommendations is a position within the Engagement Experiences & Platforms team of The Walt Disney Company’s Entertainment and ESPN Technology group.

This role reports to Data Team Lead, Personalization and Recommendations.

This is a hands-on engineering position developing recommendation systems for personalized, data-driven experiences. In this role, you will work with a cross-functional team to conceptualize and develop world-class Disney apps. Based on your experience, you will apply technical expertise to manage individual project priorities, deadlines and deliverables and will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance software solutions.

If hired, you will play a meaningful role in the evolving experiences across consumer facing digital products, with responsibilities for the technical design and implementation of large size projects and features.

We are looking for you if you are

• Highly adaptable and committed to learning

• Have a track record of delivering solutions utilizing Python

• Thrive in an agile and collaborative environment.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Build data pipelines required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources

• Explore and experiment with the latest visualization libraries and technologies and choose the right tools to support our data visualization use cases

• Work with stakeholders including the Executive, Product, Data and Design teams to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.

• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software

• Participate in the design and implementation of core Platforms and Content Distribution systems

• Collaborate with internal & external teams to define requirements and delivery schedules for projects

• Design and deliver high quality code for small to medium size projects and make critical contributions working with others on larger projects

• Work with the team to iteratively improve development practices and processes

• Build strong relationships with the team while collectively finding opportunities for improvements around quality and automation

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:
Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years hands-on professional experience with back-end systems design and development

• Robust programming skills and strong experience with Python

• Comprehensive understanding of HTTP/S, APIs, and web services

• Exposure to full lifecycle of application development, including practices like continuous integration, unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.

• Ability to collaborate in a small, productive development team as well as the larger engineering organization

• Motivated self-starter with the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; can effectively articulate complex ideas and influence others through well-reasoned explanations

• Write efficient, reliable, and maintainable code whether implementing architectural improvements, user-facing features, or fixing defects

• Troubleshoot and resolve issues, problems, and errors encountered across our various platforms

• Analyze and optimize application code for efficiency, reliability, and performance

• Understand product architecture, assisting other Software Architects as necessary

• Manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced, deadline-oriented environment

• Embrace a highly collaborative team that rewards quality code and effective communication

• Interest in industry trends on new technologies, best practices and solutions.

• A passion for innovation and raising the bar in all development aspects.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with the following technologies is a plus: AWS, Python Asyncio, FastAPI, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Postgresql, serverless computing

• Experience with working on ML based products and designing data pipelines is a 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

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY & Seattle, WA is $159,500.00 - $213,900 per year and in San Francisco, CA $166,800.00 - $223,600.00 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.