Lead Database Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

• Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Engineering Services designs, builds, and sustains technology that powers DE&E Technology’s worldwide content production and distribution platforms. In doing so, they contribute to a series of cross-functional services and technologies, including Quality Assurance, Data Analytics, Software Development, Broadcast Infrastructure, and Networking & Security. 

Job Summary:

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Responsible for building, deploying, and ensuring all DE&ET database infrastructure is available 24/7/365.

• Leverage software development and automation to design, modernize, and deliver database infrastructure.

• Participates in setting the architectural direction for database platforms and projects.

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

• Analyze, design, and deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, and highly available database infrastructure.

• Proactively plan and implement infrastructure changes through capacity forecasting, software release cycles, and right sizing.

• Provide database expertise through performance tuning, troubleshooting and administration.

• Develop, enhance, and adhere to engineering and administration standards.

• Develop automation and tooling to increase operational efficiency while ensuring system reliability and security.

• Build infrastructure and systems for scalability, resiliency, availability, and recovery though infrastructure as code and configuration management.

• Provide relevant insights of data store infrastructure through metrics, monitoring, and alerting.

• Maintain thorough and well-written documentation.

• Participate in live event support and on-call rotation.

• Provides oversight and direction to junior team members.

• Builds relationships with engineering teams and leads.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• 7+ years of related work experience with Oracle, Oracle RAC, and Oracle Exadata.

• Expert understanding of Oracle database internals, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and administration.

• Experience working in Agile software development.

• Experience with source control management tools (Git, GitLab, GitHub).

• Intermediate to advanced level of expertise in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, or Go.

• Experience running, deploying, and maintaining production systems in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and/or Amazon Web Services.

• Strong understanding and deep experience with Linux operating systems, network, and containers.

• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• Experience designing and deploying fault-tolerant, distributed, and highly available database infrastructure.

• Experience in database availability monitoring and status reporting using Oracle Enterprise Manager.

• Well-versed in Oracle database backup, restore, and recovery strategies.

• Experience with proactively identifying problems/areas of improvement and designing creative solutions to successfully remediate issues.

• Comfortable being the technical lead on complex projects such as upgrades or migrations with multiple stakeholders.

• Experience with disaster recovery planning and implementation.

• Carries out assignments with little coaching or guidance from others.

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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience operating within a database reliability engineering (DRE) and/or systems reliability engineering (SRE) role.

• Experience running, deploying, and maintaining production systems in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and/or Amazon Web Services.

• Data Guard setup and configuration to optimally support replication and migration use cases.

• Strong understanding and working experience on Exadata systems (preferably ExaCC) - virtual cluster setup, Cell Storage, Exadata Patch Management, deploying, managing, and monitoring databases on Exadata.

• Experience operating multi-tenant database architectures (CDB/PDB).

• Comfortable being the go-to resource for all Oracle related issues raised by our engineering partners.

• Experience building a proper path to production leveraging multiple lifecycles, testing, integration, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience with configuration management (Ansible, Chef).

The hiring range for this position in Bristol or Los Angeles is $124,000 to $166,200 per year, in New York City or Seattle is $129,000 to $171,000 per year and in San Francisco is $134,000 to $176,000. 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.