Lead Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology 

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world. 

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come. 

• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more. 

• Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news. 

Media Engineering is an innovative organization that is passionate about providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers worldwide, powered by exceptional technology. This work requires streamlining and repurposing technology across different business and distribution channels – including streaming, linear, and theatrical – so that technology can ebb and flow across the needs of the business. 

We’re changing the world of streaming video and looking for a dedicated Lead Software Engineer to be a key contributor to the team while driving the technical design, implementation, and improvement of services. 

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and system design efforts for the projects the team has committed to while guiding engineers in execution.

• Develop scalable and simple solutions to challenging engineering problems that are easy to maintain on ambitious timelines.

• Take ambiguous or conflicting requirements and bring clarity by proposing different solutions communicating concrete and concise trade-offs and translating them into technical plans

• Raise the quality bar across the team by driving engineering standard methodologies and innovative tools, design patterns, and engineering processes.

• Delivering through others by mentoring and empowering junior engineers on the team to develop their skills.

• Launch features across the full stack including APIs written in Java that are built in a complex microservice architecture.

• Assist the team’s stakeholders to solve problems they are facing by performing on-call duties to root cause, troubleshoot, and resolve issues promptly.

• Act as a vocal advocate in technical discussions, to drive alignment with the team’s needs for project goals and innovative solutions with external stakeholders.

Basic Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

• 7 years of software development experience and proficiency in Java

• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented programming, data structures, and algorithms (hashing, trees, graphs, search, etc.)

• Experience working with relational (SQL-based) and non-relational database (DynamoDB, Elasticache) technologies, and messaging technologies (Kinesis, Kafka, SQS, SNS)

You should be invested in iterative improvement on the software systems, domain stack and data organization to empower agile and continuous development while also maintaining high system availability and reliability. You would use technologies like Springboot/Java, MySQL, Postgres, AWS native resources (Kinesis, DynamoDB, S3, SNS, SQS, etc), and Kafka for backend development and React/Javascript for frontend engineering.

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, California is $149,300 - $200,200 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.