Lead Data Engineer at 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.

This role involves building and maintaining our Audience Manager Platform (AMP), a centralized Disney audience data platform that captures & processes all Disney consumers cross channel behavior and delivers varying summarizations in a timely manner to multiple endpoints to support all business needs.  At its core, it is a product that provides a comprehensive source of truth for customer data.  It is built around customer profiles and is able to provide insights from across the business so stakeholders can quickly act on the data through activation pipelines

The role requires expert knowledge of building scalable, fault-tolerant data processing pipelines and backend to ensure the reliable delivery of audience data

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain product-driven initiatives to improve and expand the Unified Messaging Platform, enhance/improve the underlying codebase to be extensible, reusable, and maintainable

• Promote and support Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban by actively participating in regular ceremonies such as stand-up, retrospectives and sprint planning.

• Collaborate with your squad, Product Managers, Designers, QA, Operations, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and articulate technical decisions and outcomes.

• Participate in on-call support

• Serve as an advanced resource to other Data Engineers on the team, and mentor and coach more junior members of the team helping to improve their skills, knowledge, and productivity.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.  

• Minimum 7 years of related big data engineering experience modeling and developing large data pipelines

• Hands-on experience with distributed systems such as Spark, Hadoop (HDFS, Hive, Presto, PySpark) to query and process data

• Strong Python and SQL skills processing big datasets

• Experience with at least one major MPP or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query, Databricks)

• Familiarity with Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices

• You are a problem solver with strong attention to detail and excellent analytical and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• In-depth experience with Cloud technologies like AWS (S3, ECS, EMR, EC2, Lambda, etc.)

• Solid experience with data integration toolsets (i.e Airflow), CI/CD

• Familiar with Scrum and Agile methodologies

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $149,300 to $200,200 per year and in New York, NY and Seattle, WA is $156,300 to $209,600 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.