Manager Software Engineering

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.

Job Summary:

The Audience Data and Measurement team is part of Ad Platforms, with a mission to help advertisers reach the right audience and deliver personalized, optimized experiences tailored to customer needs and interests. Our Audience Data and Measurement Platform offers a unified solution for audience data exchange and enrichment, as well as high-concurrency, low-latency audience targeting services powered by advanced data technologies. This is a dynamic, cross-domain team delivering end-to-end solutions across diverse technical areas, including machine learning, big data, microservices, and data visualization.

As an Engineering Manager, you will lead your team by example: taking a hands-on role in engineering solid, performant and scalable technical solutions.  You will use your deep engineering, architecture, and leadership skills to drive your team to iteratively and continuously deploy new features, functionality, and products to our customers.  You will be an important part of a lean DevOps and automation culture where we’ll be looking for you to collaborate with the frontend, backend and data engineering leads to drive architecture, champion code quality, and to build optimized services.  We want someone that has grown up through the software development ranks - possessing 10 or more years’ experience in designing and architecting highly scalable, secure, performant, usable web and big data applications. The ideal candidate would possess solid skills in big data and full stack technology (Spark, Flink, Java, Spring, RESTful Web Services, Python, Javascript), while having expertise with orchestration and containerization platforms (Airflow, Docker and Kubernetes), coupled with hands on persistence and data streaming technology experience (Databricks, Snowflake, MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Redis, Kafka).

While The Walt Disney Company is a large company, ideally, we’d like it if you have some previous experience in a startup environment and are comfortable performing multiple roles. We strive to get things done quickly, with high quality, and we are committed to the agile methodology. Our work is guided by lean principles (looking at value and looking for waste; not doing anything ‘for the sake of doing it’).

We’re looking for a passionate, impactful, technical leader who wants to come here to do their very best work and make their mark, add their chapter to the long and storied history of The Walt Disney Company. Someone who holds themselves and their teammates accountable in a professional, collaborative manner. A collaborative technologist who seeks to bring the best out in themselves and those around them. Someone who can provide a fresh perspective and innovative insight to our initiatives.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Coach, mentor and motivate team to follow technical standards and best practices and build best technical platform
• Inspire individual and business success. Define strategies, priorities, and expectations. Provide continuous coaching and feedback. Develop self and others and support career aspirations. Demonstrate care and compassion. Create an environment where Company values are experienced
• Contribute to organization processes that improve velocity and impact of business initiatives. Ensure Release Management standards and processes are followed by the team
• Build a constant learning culture to improve innovation and team productivity. Grow brand awareness of the team.
• Practice effective art of delegation and ensure team completes yearly OKR goals
• Optimize team's Capex and Opex budget to improve Company's bottomline
• Collaborate with fellow engineers to keep the team’s technology radar and architecture principles aligned to the industry and needs of our users
• Deliver multiple projects utilizing an Agile methodology. Provide accurate estimation of product initiatives, sprint roadmap, delivery plan and forecasts
• Take a high ownership, self-sufficient, hands-on position on the team to collaborate and drive quality, maintain application stability. Be fully aware of product requirements and coach, mentor, motivate the team to provide correct solutions. Have awareness of end-to-end Organization's engineering architecture
• Chip in ground-breaking innovation and apply the state-of-the-art technologies
• Work with leads, product managers and managers to ensure that all project initiatives are delivered on time with high quality
• Collaborate with team to develop software architectures which are robust, fault-tolerant, and cloud-native
• Work collaboratively with other service teams, build collaborative relationships with product, project managers, QA, cross team leads, build consensus and alignment amongst all members and help with resolving roadblocks
• Ensure team develops high quality components of large-scale data platform for real-time and batch processing, and own features of big data applications to fit evolving business needs
• Coach team to design next-gen cloud based big data infrastructure for batch and streaming data applications, and continuously improve performance, scalability and availability. Possess AWS managed service solution design and implementation experience
• Reason logically and creatively, identifying problems, drawing valid conclusions from the data available, and develop effective solutions while applying creative thinking in the design and development of high performing data applications
• Contribute to the best engineering practices, including the use of design patterns, architecture, design, technical analysis, research spikes, POCs, CI/CD, code review and automated tests. Ensure code is deployed to production only after thorough review and approval process.
• As a key member of the team, contribute to all aspects of the software lifecycle: design, experimentation, implementation and testing
• Design complex programs, analyze code changes and suggest improvements
• Investigate and resolve any production issues from end user to persistence layer and work to prevent them. Ensure business is not interrupted due to PROD incidents

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• Hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Engineering, or another technical field
• Have 8+ years of management  experience in software engineering in a large enterprise environment using Java, Python, Javascript, including familiarity with modern web frameworks and platforms (e.g., Spring, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka)
• Have 8+ years of management  experience in big data application development in a large enterprise environment using Java, Scala, Python, including familiarity with modern big data frameworks and platforms (e.g., Spark, Flink, Singlestore, Kafka, Nifi and AWS big data technologies)
• Be able to demonstrate significant experience working with relational databases, SQL and newer NoSQL data stores as well as event streaming platforms
• Demonstrated ability with cloud infrastructure technologies, including Terraform, K8S, Spinnaker, IAM, ALB, etc.
• Have a strong interest in open source technology
• Knowledge of building highly available and scalable services
• Passion about technologies and openness to interdisciplinary work
• Possess good communication skills and enjoy mentoring and helping others to succeed as a team
• Care about your craft and have opinions about the “right” way to do things with technology

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related technical discipline is desirable
• Previous work experience in advertising industry-based applications
• Experience working with vendor teams to deliver high quality results
• Knowledge of performance testing and application profiling (Gatling, JProfiler)
• Strong curiosity about how Disney delivers the Magic and a desire to be a part of it

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, California is $171,600 to $230,100 per year and in San Francisco, CA is $187,900 to $252,000 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.