Software Engineer II - Ad Platform, Integrating Engineering

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

Job Summary:

As a Software Engineer, you will use your deep Java, scripting, DevOps, and data persistence skills to write and test code that delivers new features for our application portfolio. You will be an important part of a motivated team where we’ll be looking for you to collaborate with the team to drive application architecture, code quality, and make sure we are building the right things for our users. We want someone that has grown up through the web software development ranks - possessing 3 or more years’ experience in designing and architecting highly scalable, secure, performant, and usable web applications using Java/Java EE. The ideal candidate would possess deep skills in server side technology (Java, Spring, RESTful Web Services), while having expertise with orchestration and containerization platforms (Docker and Kubernetes), coupled with hands on persistence and data streaming technology experience (MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Redis, Kafka).

We’d like you to be comfortable performing multiple roles. We strive to get things done quickly, with high quality, and we are committed to the agile methodology. Our work is guided by lean principles (looking at value and looking for waste; not doing anything ‘for the sake of doing it’).

We’re looking for a passionate, impactful, engineer who wants to come here to do their very best work and make their mark, add their chapter to the long and storied history of The Walt Disney Company. Someone who holds themselves and their teammates accountable in a professional, collaborative manner. A collaborative technologist who seeks to bring the best out in themselves and those around them. Someone who can provide a fresh perspective and innovative insight to our initiatives.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Collaborate with leads and influence software architecture and design to ensure that you are delivering high quality work that aligns with Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology engineering strategy.

• Collaborate on the design, development, maintenance, testing strategy, and operations of Integration API services written primarily in Java.

• Develop secure and highly performant integration services and APIs

• Collaborate with and influence technical teams to deliver quality software and ensure the maintainability and quality of code

• Engage with product and technology leaders to understand and translate requirement needs into executable solutions

• Check-in valuable, clean code on a daily basis that adds new features and capabilities

• Create reference implementations for the purpose of mentoring and leading more junior staff (when required)

• Help define engineering best practices

• Investigate and resolve any production issues from end user (UI) to service layer and work to prevent them

• Strong experience in designing and building multithreaded, distributed systems

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

• Kafka for our asynchronous and event driven architectures

• Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud for application development

• Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services

• AWS for most of our infrastructure

• Observability Platforms for monitoring, alerting, logging and metering. We also have multiple physical datacenter sites to connect to various third-party systems.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

YOU MUST…

• Hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Engineering, or another technical field

• Have 3+ years of experience in Integration tools and technologies and software using Java, Spring, Kafka, workflow orchestration, decision rules, API gateway, service mesh, event driven & API based microservices.

• Have a strong interest in integration and open source technologies.

• Strong knowledge of integration architectures, best practices, tools, techniques and platforms.

• Have some previous experience in leading teams across multiple locations and vendors.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE/EDUCATION/SKILLS

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related technical discipline is highly desirable

• Experience in vibe coding and AI tools

• Previous work experience in integration applications, products and platforms

• Experience working with vendor teams to deliver high quality results

• Knowledge of performance testing and application profiling (Gatling, JProfiler)

• Strong curiosity about how Disney delivers the Magic and a desire to be a part of it

#disneytech

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is between $120,300 - $161,300. 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.