Lead Software Engineer

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.

Product Engineering

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

Responsibilities

• Work with a team of engineers to build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting

• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions; author and share feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses

• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects; eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel; provide mentoring and advice for other engineers

• Talk to business partners to understand and refine requirements

• Participate in the on-call rotation, supporting systems and services during production incidents

• Establish standards within the team to drive quality and excellence

• Participate in organization technical community through presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

Basic Qualifications:

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

• 7+ years related experience crafting backend architectures and delivering backend applications in a production environment.

• Validated knowledge of operating large-scale high-availability backend services and JVM services

• Knowledge of AGILE/Scrum practices.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Self-learner, independent, excellent problem-solving skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Expertise in functional programming patterns and experience building RESTful services (Scala APIs)

• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and threading/concurrency

• Understanding of source control concepts and systems, CI/CD pipelines and exposure to Git

• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins and Docker. Experience with messaging technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, etc.)

• Strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.) and strong understanding of design patterns and principles

• Experience operating within a Public Cloud Provider (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)

• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, Grafana)

• Experience with storage & caching technologies: S3, S3 Compatible on-prem object storage, DynamoDB, RDBMS, Redis

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA and Glendale, CA is $152,200 to $204,100 per year, in Seattle, WA and New York, NY is $159,500 to $213,900 per year, and in 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.