Lead Software Engineer- Data Platform

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.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

• 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.

The Product & Data Engineering team is responsible for end to end development for Disney’s world-class consumer-facing products, including streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and digital products & experiences across ESPN, Marvel, Disney Studios, NatGeo, and ABC News. The team drives innovation at scale for millions of consumers around the world across Apple, Android, Smart TVs, game consoles, and the web, with our platforms powering core experiences like personalization, search, messaging and data.

Job Summary:

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help us grow the data platform. You will be embedded on the Orchestration team that runs workflow scheduling applications and data ingestion infrastructure that helps power the analytics, operations, and data science behind our flagship streaming applications - Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Star+. You’ll help further the technology that hundreds of data and software engineers, data scientists, and analysts use every day.

You'll get to understand the challenges of facilitating a high-quality, flawless media streaming experience across mobile, connected devices, and web, all while using the latest technologies available from AWS and beyond. If you're interested in working in a highly collaborative team environment like this, please get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Lead within a cross-functional team of engineers to build software for a large-scale data processing ecosystem supporting real-time and batch data that underpins all analytic and operational data flows
• Build tools and services to support data discovery, lineage, resiliency, and privacy compliance across the data platform
• Design and develop CICD processes for infrastructure components that ensure high availability and agility
• Drive software engineering and architecture best practices and standards within the team and wider organization, along with a culture of quality, innovation, and experimentation
• Provide mentorship and guidance for team members; evangelize the platform, best-practices, data driven decisions; identify new use cases and features and drive adoption

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of relevant professional experience
• Fluent in Python and Scala (or other JVM-based languages).
• Deep experience deploying and running cloud-based data solutions (preferably AWS) and infrastructure-as-code frameworks like Terraform.
• Ability to dive deep into any technical component as well as understand and drive the overall systems architecture.
• You care deeply about craftsmanship in your software and can work backwards from the customer experience.
• You have excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise with workflow scheduler tools such as Airflow.
• Experience maintaining real time data infrastructure such as Kinesis or Kafka.
• Familiarity with big data technologies such as Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, or EMR.
• Experience on a platform team, building tools for other engineers.

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field
• Master’s Degree a plus

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY and Seattle, WA is $156,300 to $209,600 per year, in Los Angeles, CA and Bristol, CT is $149,300 to $200,200 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $163,500 to $219,200 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.