Lead Software Engineer

As a Lead Software Engineer within the Experimentation & Experience Controls team, you will be responsible for leading an engineering squad delivering multi-region global distributed systems.

You will be a key part of an engaging, dynamic and inclusive engineering organization, grounded in scrum and agile practices, CI/CD, great collaboration and motivated by a commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

You’ll be working on our high-scale in-house A/B testing and Feature Flagging product, capable of serving millions of concurrent requests with single digit millisecond response times. Deeply integrated into our platform to enable experimentation, feature, & release management, and real-time user targeting across every aspect of Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology (DEEPT).

Responsibilities

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll:

• Lead an agile squad that is fully responsible for delivering critical products or services running in multi-region cloud environments, driving innovation and collaboration within the team.
• Ensure high-quality consistent delivery by promoting and contributing to Agile practices and ceremonies within your squad, driving code reviews and feature development, and balancing priorities to avoid compromising when it comes to testing and performance at scale.
• Be empowered to make technical and architectural decisions, and to influence the roadmap for your squad and the wider team. Working in partnership with your peers across Product, Project Management, and Engineering to ensure your squad's direction aligns with the strategic goals of the organization.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture that values learning and development, close collaboration between team members, and strives for excellence.
• Mentor engineers within and outside of your squad to help them improve their technical abilities and build their profiles within and outside of the organization.

Experience

• Experience leading the delivery of a significant product or feature, ideally within an Agile team.
• Understanding of high-quality coding, testing, and development practices.
• Experience in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) language such as: Java, Scala, or Kotlin. Our teams primarily use Scala, but we're happy for you to learn that with us. We follow functional programming principles and use frameworks such as Cats Effect and ZIO.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.
• Experience with at least one of the following cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Compute (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.
• Familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling.

Other Relevant Skills (Not requirements)

• Experience building micro/web services - including REST and GraphQL.
• Experience or interest in functional programming and its real-world applications - particularly Scala stacks such as Cats Effect and ZIO.
• Experience of designing, building & operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.
• Experience Monitoring and optimising applications, especially those written for the JVM.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, Aurora, & DynamoDB with experience modelling & optimising query performance.
• Experience with Kinesis, Kafka, or any other streaming data.
• Familiarity with data warehouse, pipeline, and analytics platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake.
• Excellent communication skills, specifically in understanding, framing and simplifying both technical & business requirements.
• Comfort with ambiguity and leading conversations where discordant views are present.
• Experience mentoring and coaching more junior engineers on both technical and soft skills.
• Contributions to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.

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.
• 7 years related work experience.

The hiring range for this position in NYC is $159,500 to $213,900. 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.