Lead Software 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. 

Lifecycle Messaging’s mission is to create and deliver scaled, customer centric multi-channel messaging experiences across the customer journey that drive impact in the form of engagement, revenue growth, customer delight & brand trust. Our platform, the Unified Messaging Platform helps us to inform, engage, and delight our guests. 

Responsibilities 

• Design and implement tier-1 microservices in Java and/or Scala.  

• Design core, backend software components for the Unified Messaging Platform  

• Implement asynchronous processes to run in the cloud for various data transformation operations.  

• Participate in Agile methodology and SCRUM processes such as Sprint Planning, Backlog grooming, Daily Standups, and Retrospectives with the team.  

• Provide on-call support for critical services on a rotational basis.  

• Own features/functionality and deliver projects end-to-end with high quality and robust architecture.  

• Lead the design & enhancement of critical services in UMP, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability. 

• Research and integrate new technologies into the production environment to optimize core service offerings.  

• Provide technical guidance to junior team members, covering code quality, system design, and best practices in software development.  

• Actively participate in code reviews, offering constructive feedback to improve code quality, system reliability, and performance 

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

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 of 7 of years related work experience. 

• Experience and/or certification with Cloud Services  

• Excellent understanding of software development fundamentals  

• Experience with writing unit, integration, and functional tests  

• Experience with standard CI/CD procedures & tools like Jenkins, GitHub action, spinnaker  

• Proven ability to integrate with service APIs and/or SDKs  

• Experience working in a modern, agile software team with version control & project management tools (e.g., Git, SVN, Jira, Basecamp)  

Preferred Qualifications  

• Experience in a Java and/or alternative JVM application development environments (Scala)  

• Knowledge or certification with AWS services, including ECS (Docker), S3, EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch  

• Experience with big data technologies & tools like Spark, Databricks, EMR  

• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure as code tooling  

• Experience with graph-based data workflows such as Apache Airflow, Meson  

• Experience building scalable, fault-tolerant, high-uptime systems  

• Creative and inventive problem solving  

• Experience mentoring other developers 

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