Lead Software Engineer

Job ID: 10110449

Location: New York, New York, United States / Bristol, Connecticut, United States / Santa Monica, California, United States / San Francisco, California, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States / Morrisville, North Carolina, United States

Business: Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

Date posted: Feb. 18, 2025

Job Summary:

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.

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join the Targeting Innovation team within the Media Engineering organization. The Targeting Innovation team’s mission is to build highly available, high throughput services that are critical to delivering high quality content to our subscribers. This involves systems engaged in advanced decisioning around traffic shaping and routing to optimize for both cost as well as the user’s experience.

Responsibilities

• Work with a team of engineers building software in a collaborative development process.
• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects.
• Interface with business stakeholders to understand and refine requirements.
• Eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel.
• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting.
• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions.
• Participate in the code review process by providing feedback on pull requests.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, supporting systems and services during production incidents.
• Author and provide feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses.
• Provide mentoring and advice for other engineers.
• Establish engineering best practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence.
• Contribute to the DEE&T technical community through presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of 7+ years related experience designing backend architectures and delivering backend applications in a production environment.
• Knowledge of AGILE/Scrum practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Self-learner, independent, excellent problem-solving skills.
• Expertise in functional programming to include Scala.
• Experience building RESTful services (Scala APIs).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and threading/concurrency.
• Understanding of source control concepts and exposure to Git.
• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins and Docker.
• Knowledge of caching technologies.
• Strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.).
• Strong understanding of design patterns and principles.
• Knowledge of source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.
• Demonstrated knowledge of crafting and operating large-scale high-availability backend services and JVM services.
• Experience with messaging technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, etc.).
• Experience operating within a Public Cloud Provider (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud).
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, Grafana).

Compensation

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

About Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at the vanguard of innovation.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise.

Disability Accommodation For Employment Applications

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities.