Senior Scala Engineer

At Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology we’re responsible for building what aims to be the largest media streaming platform in the world, serving not just Disney+, but ESPN, ESPN+, Hulu and much more. We foster innovation, we challenge each other, and we put our users before all else: connecting them with the stories they love.

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, high-performing, rewarding culture. If this sounds like something for you, read on!

How we work

The teams in Manchester work in small squads that promote Agile practices. Each team and their respective squads are responsible for design & implementation of services, infrastructure, deployment, delivery, and maintenance. We take great pride in owning what we build and seeing things through to the end.

We have a mature DevOps culture in place where teams are responsible for the infrastructure and deployment of those applications. We have the autonomy to choose the technologies and processes that help us achieve our objectives. So each team leverages the technology that fits their needs best. You’ll see us working with data processing / streaming like Kinesis; application technologies like PostgreSQL, Redis & DynamoDB; and breaking things using in-house chaos principles and tools such as Gatling to drive load… all deployed and hosted on AWS.

Many of our teams are advocates of functional programming, so you can expect to join a team that’s applying principles from FP to build these services: using Scala, Cats, ZIO, http4s, FS2, and Cats Effect.

The interview process

Our interview aims to take a relaxed & practical approach that mirrors how we’ll work together should you join us. The interview is broken down into sections which will each focus on a different area. Our overall aim is assessing whether we’re a good fit for each other: both technically and otherwise. We understand interviewing is a two way process and we want people that will help us grow and improve - in any and all areas!

You can read more about our process here.

What you’ll do

• Be part of an Agile team building one of the world's largest media streaming platforms.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture that values learning & development, close collaboration between team members, and strives for excellence.
• Leverage, learn and apply cutting edge technologies on challenging and varied business domains.
• Develop your technical understanding to support and build your career.
• Have the opportunity to contribute to our open source or blog communities
• Apply principled engineering practices including unit testing, integration testing, and continuous integration.
• Contribute to and lead a significant part of the implementation, design, testing, and deployment of services within your team.
• Act as a mentor and an example to others in your team and across the organisation.

Things we’re looking for

Good engineers can learn new skills - so 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 & improve is what we’re looking for!

• Demonstrable understanding of high-quality coding, testing, and development practices
• Experience working in a “Devops” environment.
• Experience or interest in functional programming and its real-world applications - particularly Scala stacks such as Scalaz, Cats Effect and ZIO.
• Experience of designing, building & operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.
• Experience with Cloud Infrastructure, preferably with AWS
• Experience building micro/web services - including REST and GraphQL.
• Monitoring and optimising applications, especially those written for the JVM.
• Relational and NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, Aurora, & DynamoDB with experience modelling & optimising query performance.
• Kinesis or any other streaming data.
• Excellent communication skills, specifically in understanding, framing and simplifying both technical & business requirements.
• Comfort with ambiguity and leading conversations where discordant views are present.
• Experience mentoring and coaching more junior engineers on both technical and soft skills.
• Contributions to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.

Education & Experience

These are not hard requirements, they’re guidelines

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 5 years related work experience.

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
• Disney+ Subscription
• Excellent parental and guardian leave
• Employee Resource Groups – WOMEN @ Disney, Disney DIVERSITY, Disney PRIDE, our new disability & neurodiversity focused group - ENABLED, and our Mental Health & Wellbeing Group, TRUST.

The Teams

Experimentation & Feature Management

Our high-scale in-house A/B testing platform. Deeply integrated into our platform to enable experimentation on every aspect of the product. We’re building a fully bespoke platform using cutting edge technologies, capable of serving millions of concurrent requests with single digit millisecond response times. We provide our users with a fully self service experience including comprehensive in-tool curation and analysis of experiments.

We’re also responsible for our platform’s feature flagging capabilities, extending our experimentation platform to provide fully dynamic, user specific configuration to all clients, enabling a truly universal end to end process for test, rollout, experiment, release, rollback capabilities.

Subscription Services

Responsible for supporting new customer signup and retention flows, billing services and payment integrations. The Subscription team supports high traffic API services that provide the source of truth for all products, subscriptions and entitlements owned by our subscriber base. This data is surfaced globally to our streaming client apps as well as via real time data streams that feed other platform services and our analytics capabilities. The team also supports subscription management functionality providing users the ability to upgrade/ downgrade their plan or cancel, for example as well as driving the subscription lifecycle including supporting monthly renewals.

The Walt Disney Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We strive to be a diverse workforce that is representative of our audiences, and where all can thrive and belong. We are committed to building a team that includes and respects a variety of voices, identities, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.