Lead Software 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.

What You'll Do

The Data Platforms Team, a segment under the Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DEET) organization is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our Experimentation and Personalization Data Team. Experimentation is critical to improving products in the DEET Portfolio because it allows us to quantify content performance, measure advertising effectiveness, help users discover new content, detect fraud, and track user journeys. Overall, this data enables us to better understand the user experience so we can continue improving our service for our users, advertisers, and content partners. Our Experimentation and Personalization Data Team is seeking a highly motivated Software Engineer with a strong technical background who is passionate about designing and building systems to process data at scale, solving challenging problems in both batch and real-time data processing, and working across software and data disciplines to engineer solutions. Our tech stack includes AWS, Databricks, Airflow, and Spark, and primary languages are Scala and Java.

Responsibilities

• Help lead the design and growth of our Data Products and Services enabling experimentation and personalization
• Design and develop scalable data warehousing solutions, building ETL pipelines in Big Data environments (cloud, on-prem, hybrid)
• Design and develop systems to query, process, and deliver data out of the analytics environment into internal tools and systems that serve millions of customers
• Build applications to read, process, and aggregate streaming data at scale to calculate user behavior features in near-real time
• Our tech stack includes AWS, Databricks, Airflow, Spark, and languages include Scala, Python, Kotlin and Typescript
• Contribute to architectural designs and help plan for maintainability, observability, and future development concerns
• Collaborate with a wide variety of stakeholder including Product Manager, Technical Program Managers, Data Engineers, Software Engineers, Data Scientists, and Analysts to identify opportunities, gather requirements, and help guide the direction in which we develop new capabilities
• Maintain detailed documentation of your work and changes to support data quality and data governance
• Ensure high operational efficiency and quality of your solutions to meet SLAs and support commitment to our customers
• Be an active participant and advocate of agile/scrum practice to ensure health and process improvements for your team

Basic Qualifications

• At least 7 years of data engineering experience working with data and applications at petabyte scale
• Expertise in stream processing (Kafka, Structured Streaming) and aggregation at high volumes with attention to reliability and observability
• Familiarity with data pipelines and orchestration frameworks (Spark, Hadoop, Databricks, Airflow)
• Deep experience with developing for a cloud environment (AWS preferred), including cloud databases (Snowflake, Redshift, DynamoDB)
• Knowledge of both SQL and NoSQL databases, and how to select storage technologies
• Strong programming skills in Java, Scala or Python
• Demonstrated skills in data modeling and analysis techniques
• Understanding of how to use and design APIs
• Familiar with Scrum and Agile methodologies
• You are a problem solver with strong attention to detail and excellent analytical and communication skills, who will collaborate to build greenfield solutions with high business value

Required Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering or comparable field of study

Additional Information

#DISNEYTECH

1. The hiring range for this position in Seattle, Washington is $142,600 to $191,100 per year, New York NY is $142,600 to $191,100 per year, and Santa Monica, CA is $152,200 to $204,100 per year, San Francisco, CA is $166,800 to $223,600 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.