Lead Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is looking for a Technical Lead Software Engineer to join the Playback Services team within the Media Engineering organization. The Playback Services team’s mission is to build highly available, high throughput services that are essential to delivering high quality content to our subscribers. The team is responsible for the backend of media playback, facilitating media selection, device customization, and antipiracy technologies. If you enjoy streaming media, are interested in live sports and entertainment, or just want to join a fast-growing team that plays a meaningful role in the core functionality of our streaming products, then our team is for you.

As a Tech Lead on the PlayIO team, you'll be directly influencing the performance, reliability, and scalability of our core applications. You'll work closely with a talented team of software engineers, acting as a technical anchor and mentor. Your days will involve guiding critical architectural decisions, diving deep into complex code reviews, and troubleshooting production issues to ensure seamless operation. You'll also play a pivotal role in shaping our technical roadmap, championing best practices in areas like system resilience, and developer efficiency.

You'll make a significant impact on the organization by contributing to the development of new features, and ensuring our services remain highly available for our users. By optimizing system performance, and nurturing a culture of excellence within your team, you'll directly contribute to an enhanced user experience on our streaming applications. This role is crucial for our continued growth, empowering us to confidently scale our offerings, and innovate rapidly.

Responsibilities:

• Work with a team of engineers building software in a collaborative development  process  

• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise  setting  

• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions  

• Participate in the code review process by providing feedback on pull requests

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

• Author and provide feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses

• Provide mentoring and advice for other engineers  

• Establish engineering best practices and standards within the team to drive quality  and excellence  

• Contribute to the DSS technical community through presentations, tech talks, and  other knowledge-sharing efforts 

Basic Qualifications:

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

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

• Experience building RESTful Services in Scala

• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, async/await) and thread + concurrency

• Understanding of source control concepts and exposure to Git

• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins, Spinnaker, and Docker

• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and common design patterns.

• Demonstrated knowledge in building and operating large-scale high availability backend services

• Knowledge of caching technologies

• Proficiency in Cloud Platforms and DevOps Practices

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.  

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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated knowledge in building and operating large-scale high availability backend services in a JVM language

• Functional Programming in Scala

• Experience building RESTful Services in Scala

• Expertise in Performance Optimization and Scalability

• Demonstrated ability to analyze complex technical challenges, propose well-reasoned solutions, and articulate design choices clearly.

• Experience with: AWS (EKS, S3, ElastiCache, Kinesis, OpenSearch), Scala, Java, Python, Terraform. Experience with observability tooling (ex. DataDog).

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