Lead Software Engineer

Key Skills

Apache Airflow, Apache Kafka, Asyncio, AWS, Data pipelines, Data science techniques, Database, Effective communication skills, Employee life cycle, FastAPI, HTTP acceleration, Java Programming, Leadership Skill, Machine learning techniques, Postgres, Python Programming, Snowflake, SQL, Streaming APIs

Job Description

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 vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

DE&E Platform Software Engineering team is responsible for building and maintaining all the core platforms and systems behind our consumer-facing and business products, including Identity, Growth and Lifecycle, Personalization, Client Facing APIs, Back End Engineering for consumer products and gaming/fantasy platforms, as well as other internal tools and engineering services.

The Engagement Experiences & Platforms team innovates and creates experiences to delight, engage & retain our guests on Disney+, Hulu, Star+, ESPN Fantasy and ABC News. It also builds foundational platforms that enable scaling experiences with guest volume and the diversity of use cases across our brands.

Our team is…

• A group of engineers and data scientists with diverse expertise delivering solutions together.
• Collaborative and dynamic.
• Embracing agile practices.
• Using continuous integration/automated testing.
• Led by startup veterans.

Job Summary:

This Lead Software Engineer, Personalization and Recommendations is a position within the Engagement Experiences & Platforms team of The Walt Disney Company’s Entertainment and ESPN Technology group.

This role reports to Data Team Lead, Personalization and Recommendations.

If hired, you will play a meaningful role in the evolving experiences across consumer facing digital products, with responsibilities for the technical design and implementation of medium size projects and features. We are looking for you if you are:

• Highly adaptable and committed to learning
• Have a track record of delivering solutions utilizing Python
• Thrive in an agile and collaborative environment.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Create and maintain optimal data pipeline architecture
• Build the infrastructure required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources
• Work with stakeholders including the Executive, Product, Data and Design teams to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software
• Participate in the design and implementation of core Platforms and Content Distribution systems
• Collaborate with internal & external teams to define requirements and delivery schedules for projects
• Design and deliver high quality code for small to medium size projects and make critical contributions working with others on larger projects
• Work with the team to iteratively improve development practices and processes
• Build strong relationships with the team while collectively finding opportunities for improvements around quality and automation

Required Education and Experience:

• 7+ years hands-on professional experience with back-end systems development
• Robust programming skills and strong experience with Python
• Advanced working SQL knowledge and experience working with relational databases, query authoring as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases.
• Experience building and optimizing data pipelines, architectures and data sets.
• Ability to collaborate in a small, productive development team as well as the larger engineering organization managing multiple competing priorities
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; can effectively articulate complex ideas and influence others through well-reasoned explanations
• Exposure to full lifecycle of application development, including practices like continuous integration, unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.

Preferred Experiences

• Experience with the following technologies: AWS, JAVA, Python Asyncio, FastAPI, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Postgresql, serverless computing
• Comprehensive understanding of HTTP/S, APIs, and web services
• Experience with working on ML based products and designing data pipelines
• Write efficient, reliable, and maintainable code whether implementing architectural improvements, user-facing features, or fixing defects
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues, problems, and errors encountered across our various platforms
• Analyze and optimize application code for efficiency, reliability, and performance
• Understand product architecture, assisting other Software Architects as necessary
• Interest in industry trends on new technologies, best practices and solutions. A passion for innovation and raising the bar in all development aspects.

Required education:

• Bachelor’s degree, with equivalent work experience in MIS, Computer Science or related discipline.

The hiring range for this position in Washington is $148,502 - $199,210 per year, in California is $142,106 - $207,900 per year and in New York is $148,502 - $199,210 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.