Lead Software Engineer

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.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

We’re changing the world of streaming video and looking for a fearless, talented software engineer to build our vision of a global content metadata management platform to delight our operators and captivate our viewers. As a Lead Software Engineer in the Content Catalog team, you will drive the technical architecture, implementation and improvement of services that manage millions of titles delivered to hundreds of millions of viewers. Our services receive content from over 1500 partners and manages who can watch what, when, where and how. You will be expected to work cross-functionally with product, operations, project management and upstream and downstream engineering teams to align on our designs for new and extensible models and features. You will also drive Dev Ops best practices for the team, so our software just runs itself.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Lead technical design and implementation of new features.
• Drive project phasing and delivery together with your manager and Technical Project Managers.
• Identify areas from improvements in our systems and workflows.
• Set engineering standards for the team and proactively seek out ways to improve the codebase.
• Mentor Junior and mid-level engineers.
• Take a user-centric approach to improving our content management systems, tools, and workflows.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years of software development experience, and proficiency in Java, Python, or similar language and related service frameworks like Spring Boot or Django.
• Experience in relational databases like MySQL or Postgres and NoSQL databases like DynamoDB or MongoDB.
• Excellent problem solving and critical thinking skills in order to efficiently drive resolution of critical issues.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills and ability to drive consensus across cross functional business partners.
• Proficiency in design and implementation of scalable distributed systems providing resilient and high performance for both transactional and eventually consistent behaviors.
• Strong knowledge of core CS fundamentals and data structures (hashing, trees, graphs, queues, heaps), and a tenacious drive to minimize algorithmic complexity.
• Experience with web services, preferably AWS, and firm understanding of best practices in architecture and usage of messaging, queues, storage, relational and non-relational DBs, distributed caches, search indexes, operational monitoring and performance tuning.
• A strong sense of ownership of personal relationships, technical systems and operational issues.

Preferred:

• Experience working with Trunk-based development and CI/CD.
• Experience in front end development such as React or Angular.
• Experience with serverless deployments like AWS Lambda.

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $152,200 to $204,100 per year, in Seattle, WA and New York, NY is $159,500 to $213,900 per year, and in San Francisco, CA is $166,800 to $223,600 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.