Lead Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology has been investing tremendously to modernize its platform by developing a platform layer that exposes the commerce system’s capabilities to our front end device clients (Web, Mobile, Living Room devices) and our service partners like the VX platform. The primary objective of the team is to abstract away the core commerce domains from client teams and centralize all of growth life platform capabilities into one shared layer. Another objective of the team is to decouple these core commerce systems to allow for faster feature delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Work alongside Product and Business teams to understand the business implications and user flows for sign up and user account management.

• Architect and develop a future proof API layer that exposes the commerce lifecycle platform capabilities to clients.

• Craft and Develop robust API contracts and scalable microservices for internal clients.

• As a lead engineer, you will define technical proposals and orchestrate the high-level design and system flow between clients and backend systems.

• Mentor junior engineers on the team.

• Be the go-to person for technical question

• Understand key dependencies such as  the core subscription, billing, and payment systems and how they will affect clients.

• Be responsible for the end-to-end software development lifecycle for our systems: Conceptualize, design, build, code-review, test, load-test, launch, measure performance.

• Collaborate with the Product team to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementation.

• Define technical and operational critical metrics to measure system health.

• Challenge our team and software to be even better.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

• 7+ years of relevant software engineering experience

• Strong code design and architectural skill

• API design experience (authoring and providing feedback) with stakeholders

• Strong programming (Java or other related programming languages) and scripting skills

• Familiarity with SQL

• Outstanding communication, collaboration skills, and a strong ethic of teamwork

• Quality-first demeanor with a focus on test automation and CI/CD

• The ability to jump into a project and contribute immediately to both architecture and implementation

• Strong analytical skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Spinnaker and Kubernetes

• Experience with Spring Webflux or Reactive programming in Java

• Experience with GraphQL (implementation and integration) 

• Experience or familiarity with gRPC

• Experience with AWS, Terraform

The hiring range for this position in Los Angelos, CA is $152,200 - $204,100, and for Seattle, WA is $159,500 - $213,900 and for New York City is $159,500 - $213,900, and for San Francisco, CA is $166,800 - $223,600. 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.