Lead Software Engineer

At The Walt Disney Company we’re building what aims to be the largest media streaming platform in the world, serving not just Disney+, but also ESPN+ and Hulu. Every day is a moment to make a difference for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

You'll find the teams in Manchester working on high throughput globally distributed systems, covering domains such as Growth & Commerce, Reliability, and Experience & Engagement - which includes our in-house Experimentation platform. We have a mature DevOps culture and collaborate on all areas of the technology stack: including UI, backend services, real time data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

Our team members all contribute to a dynamic, inclusive, and self-motivated culture, and are responsible for the full development, delivery, and operational support of critical global services.

We’re looking for people who want to challenge themselves, to grow; people who understand scale and care deeply about reliability. You will be surrounded by colleagues eager to help you succeed and be part of an ambitious, rewarding culture.

What You Will Do

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll:

• Lead an agile squad that is fully responsible for delivering critical products or services running in multi-region cloud environments, driving innovation and collaboration within the team.
• Ensure high-quality consistent delivery by promoting and contributing to Agile practices and ceremonies within your squad, driving code reviews and feature development, and balancing priorities to avoid compromising when it comes to testing and performance at scale.
• Be empowered to make technical and architectural decisions, and to influence the roadmap for your squad and the wider team, working in partnership with your peers across Product, Project Management, and Engineering to ensure your squad's direction aligns with the strategic goals of the organisation.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture that values learning and development, close collaboration between team members, and strives for excellence.
• Mentor engineers within and outside of your squad to help them improve their technical abilities and build their profiles within and outside of the organisation.

Things we’re looking for

• We don’t expect candidates to be strong in all areas - these are not barriers to entry. Strength in some areas and an appetite to learn and improve is what we’re looking for!
• Experience leading the delivery of a significant product or feature, ideally within an Agile team.
• Understanding of high-quality coding, testing, and development practices.
• Experience in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) language such as: Java, Scala, or Kotlin. Our teams primarily use Scala, but we're happy for you to learn that with us. We follow functional programming principles and use frameworks such as Cats Effect and ZIO.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.
• Experience with at least one of the following cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Compute (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.
• Familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling.

The interview process:

We view interviewing as a two-way process and take a relaxed, practical approach that reflects how our teams work together daily. This involves reviewing code, pair programming, and solving an architectural problem together. We’ll conclude with a non-technical interview where we’ll both spend time understanding what it will be like working with each other.

The Perks

• 25 days annual leave
• Private medical insurance & dental care
• Free Park Entry: You will have the opportunity to enter any of our parks with your family and friends for free
• Disney Discounts: you are entitled to discounts on designated Disney products, resort F&B and ticketing
• Excellent parental and guardian leave
• Employee Resource Groups – WOMEN @ Disney, Disney DIVERSITY, Disney PRIDE, ENABLED, and our Mental Health & Wellbeing Group, TRUST.