Director, Software Engineering

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.

About The Organization

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.

Identity Engineering delivers Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) capabilities across The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) including but not limited to: D+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Parks. Identity Engineering squads build and run high-traffic and globally replicated systems which form an integral and visible part of every consumer’s journey at Disney properties.

As Director of Software Engineering within DEEP&T, you will touch the lives of Disney fans around the world by working on innovative digital products and platforms from Disney, ESPN, National Geographic, ABC, Marvel, Star Wars, and more. You will serve as a senior leader on the Identity Engineering team, whose primary goal is to continually improve the quality of Disney’s digital products while decreasing time-to-market and enabling innovation.

This role makes you a stakeholder in every digital property developed and released by the DE&E Technology group, as well as the platforms and enterprise applications that power them.

As an experienced software engineering leader with a passion for leading teams that drive quality and productivity into world-class applications and services, you will lead a talented and driven group of software engineers and managers dedicated to building test automation platforms, tools, reports, and services. These enable product delivery teams to ensure that all Disney products achieve the quality and reliability expected by our guests. You will also lead a team of quality-focused engineers and managers who are embedded with product delivery teams to plan and execute automation activities, serve as automation experts, and implement toolsets as subject matter experts.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of software engineers and engineering managers to deliver oversee Identity tooling:
• Identity Platform Tools include: LaunchPad: Identity BU Admin, TWDC Legal and Compliance Center, Master Compliance Table, LaunchPad: AuthZ, and LaunchPad: L10n Publisher
• Collaborates with senior leaders across DE&E Technology to understand needs and provide solutions, including evangelizing and directing technology and process change across all DE&E Technology.
• Mentor and develop managers and senior-level individual contributors.
• Serves as technical architect and technical decision-maker for the platforms, tools, and services provided by the Quality Engineering team around the Commerce, Growth, and Identity services functions.
• Executes the operational and organizational strategy for the Identity Engineering team based on KPIs, and drives the tracking, course-correction, and achievement of these KPIs.

Required Skills

• Familiarity with at least one of the following Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages: Java, Scala, or Kotlin.
• Familiarity with at least one of the following cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Compute (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.
• Familiarity with the implementation of Identity-related standards, specifications, and security mechanisms such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and single-sign-on (SSO).

Desirable Skills

• Familiarity with DevOps methods of operation, at scale.
• Consistent record of the successful delivery of new cloud infrastructure projects to a global user-base.
• Experience with designing and operating globally resilient deployments.
• Experienced leader of globally geo-located teams and third-party vendors.
• Familiarity with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Terraform, and infrastructure as code (IaC) standard methodologies.
• Familiarity with the Scala programming language and popular functional frameworks such as: Cats, Cats Effect, ZIO, and http4s.
• Familiarity with both object oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming (FP) best practices.
• Familiarity with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Terraform, and infrastructure as code (IaC) best practices.
• Experience with Agile at scale using one or more frameworks such as SAFE or LESS.

Required Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.