Manager, Database Reliability Engineering

Job Description

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technological solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

The Data Engineering Manager role is part of the central Data Platforms and Database Systems team supporting enterprise-wide data services across The Walt Disney Company. As a leader within the data engineering family, the primary responsibility is to drive innovation and scalability across Snowflake, NoSQL, and data integration platforms. In addition, the role oversees a DBRE team managing PostgreSQL and MySQL, ensuring dependable database operations that complement and strengthen the company’s data engineering capabilities. This position emphasizes building scalable architectures, advancing automation, and fostering technical excellence across all data platforms.

Responsibilities of Role:

• Lead, build, and mentor high-performing teams in data engineering and database reliability, fostering ownership, innovation, and engineering excellence.

• Define and communicate a clear vision and roadmap for data platforms aligned to business and technology strategy.

• Architect and oversee data pipelines, ingestion frameworks, and integration solutions to manage structured and unstructured data from multiple sources.

• Drive adoption of modern data engineering practices including ETL/ELT, stream processing, and automation frameworks.

• Ensure data quality, integrity, governance, and observability across cloud (Snowflake, AWS, Azure), hybrid, and on-premises environments.

• Provide leadership for PostgreSQL and MySQL operations, including high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and performance optimization.

• Partner with application engineering, analytics, DevOps, and security teams to deliver robust and compliant data platforms.

• Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and architectures for data management and platform scalability.

• Manage project schedules, resources, and delivery milestones for both data engineering initiatives and database reliability efforts.

• Present strategies, progress, and recommendations in senior technical and executive forums.

• Develop and manage budgets, optimizing spend on cloud services, licensing, and infrastructure.

• Promote a culture of continuous improvement, customer focus, and technical excellence.

Must Haves:

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering and database management, with proven leadership in managing technical teams.

• Strong expertise in modern data platforms: Snowflake, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, or similar orchestration tools.

• Deep knowledge of NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, NeptuneDB) and relational DBMS (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle).

• Proven success designing and managing ETL/ELT pipelines, streaming solutions, and large-scale data integrations.

• Proficiency in programming/scripting (Python, Scala, Java, SQL).

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation).

• Experience managing production database environments on-prem and in the cloud (AWS RDS, Azure Managed DBs).

• Strong communication and executive presentation skills.

• Demonstrated ability to manage budgets and optimize cloud/data infrastructure costs.

Nice To Haves:

• Contribute to internal tooling and dashboards using Streamlit and Jupyter Notebooks

• Working knowledge of Linux and Windows server environments.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes or containerized data workloads.

• Experience with data governance, metadata management, or data catalogs.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or related field.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in New York and Washington is $179,700 - $241,000 per year and in California is $171,600 - $230,100 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.