Lead Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology (DEEPT) 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.

Engineering Services designs, builds, and sustains technology that powers DE&E Technology’s worldwide content production and distribution platforms. In doing so, they contribute to a series of cross-functional services and technologies, including Quality Assurance, Data Analytics, Software Development, Broadcast Infrastructure, and Networking & Security.

About The Role

The Privacy Services team within the Commerce, Data, and Identity organization within the larger Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product and Technology organization is in search of a Senior Software Engineer.  As a member of the Privacy Services team you be responsible for creating innovative self serve modularized tooling that enables the entire organization to utilize data effectively and responsibly – driving key business decisions.  The Privacy Services team is also responsible for architecting, developing, and maintaining our “Foundational” medallion software which serves as the epicenter of all data across our organization.  The team also works closely with all other business areas including Analytics, Data Science, Data Verticals, and Service Engineering teams to ensure their business needs are met.  The Privacy Services team is seeking to grow their team of world class Software Engineers that share their charisma and enthusiasm for making a positive impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and implementation of a self serve modularized software framework to allow teams to create new compliant datasets at scale using scala, python, spark, and a variety of other tools. 

• Build out a robust observability, alerting, logging, and system control plane that allows easy diagnosis of any issues across all our data pipelines.

• Contribute to maintaining, updating, and expanding existing Privacy Services software deployments in Scala and Python / Spark while maintaining strict uptime SLAs

• Build software tooling that abstracts complexity from our customers to ease dataset migrations – working with data consumers and our governance organization.

• Work to architect and build world class modularized tooling to understand our very complex environments to come up with plans for simplification, migration, and maintenance.

• Contribute to developing and documenting both internal and external standards and best practices for software deployments, configurations, naming conventions, partitioning strategies, and more.

• Architect, design, and code shared libraries in Scala and Python that abstract complex business logic to allow consistent functionality across all data pipelines across the Data organization

• Tune our existing software framework trading off time and costs for a series of complex algorithm dataset manipulations scaled across 100s of deployments.

• Tech stack includes Airflow, Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Scala, Python

• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and other engineers to drive the success of the Foundational Platform

• Maintain detailed documentation of your work and changes to support data quality and data governance requirements

• Be an active participant and advocate of agile/scrum ceremonies to collaborate and improve processes for our team

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience in the data space

• Strong software algorithmic problem-solving expertise

• Strong fundamental Scala and Python software programming skills

• Good understanding of AWS or other cloud provider resources (S3)

• Strong SQL skills and ability to creatively problem solve and dive deep into our data and software ecosystem

• Hands-on production environment experience with distributed processing systems such as Apache Spark

• Hands-on production experience with workflow orchestration systems such as Airflow for creating and maintaining data pipelines

• Scripting language experience (Bash, PowerShell)

• Willingness and ability to learn and pick up new skillsets

• Self-starting problem solver with an eye for detail and excellent analytical and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems preferred

• Experience with at least one major Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query)

• Experience in developing APIs with GraphQL

• Deep Understanding of AWS or other cloud providers as well as infrastructure as code

• Familiarity with Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices

• Familiar with Scrum and Agile methodologies

Required Education

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

Additional Information

#DISNEYTECH

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