Principal Software Engineer

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 our 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 enhance 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 here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power our 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 implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

The Ads & Data Platform team is responsible for building and delivering the technology that supports Disney’s industry-leading, multi-billion dollar advertising business. Working across all of Disney’s streaming and linear channels, this team’s scope is multifaceted – they impact everything from core infrastructure development to the viewer-first ad formats subscribers see on their screens. Award-winning technologies, like the proprietary Disney Ad Server or DRAX, Disney’s programmatic advertising solution, are the backbone of Disney’s ad business and a key driver of Disney’s future success. What sets Disney’s advertising business apart, and what makes working here such a cool opportunity, is a combination of: world-class advertising technology built in-house, and the most beloved brands, franchises, and content!

The Ad Serving Engineering organization within Disney Entertainment and ESPN organization is fully responsible for building, enhancing and maintaining the high-performance, distributed, microservice-based Digital Advertising Platform. The platform is charged with the qualification, delivery, and tracking of Digital Advertising campaigns (Video on Demand, Live TV, and innovative interactive ads) across all of Disney online properties, including Hulu and ESPN+.

In addition, Ad Serving teams collaborate in the development of supporting

components, such as anti-ad fatigue systems, impression counting pipelines, and ad experience flows. We also work on integrations with critical services responsible for the correct pacing, targeting, and selection of ads.

As a Principal Software Engineer of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software.

On a daily basis you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.
• Demonstrated ownership for the projects delivered by your team and department
• Expertise in designing and implementing robust, scalable, redundant distributed systems, as well as in advocating best practices to fellow engineers
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast paced environment
• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health
• Knowledge on recent technologies and their application within our systems
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements to our services
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism
• Your unique view and experience

Responsibilities:

• Writing and reviewing a lot of code and tests
• Reviewing code and test implementations for best practices and algorithmic complexity
• Available for a weekly-rotating On-Call support schedule
• Reading requirements documentation from Product and translating into implementation tickets, and leading the team through execution
• Defining, reviewing, and documenting software and system designs in a high throughput, low latency microservices environment
• Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors and alerts
• Delegating tasks to engineers across all teams, as needed

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering or relevant work experience
• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• Advanced proficiency with Java, such as understanding heap, multi-threading, garbage collection, profiling
• Demonstrable analytical / problem solving / design skills in a highly distributed and highly available services ecosystem
• Excellent communication, collaboration skills and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences

Comprehensive experience with:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects
• Non-relational database technologies e.g. DynamoDB
• Redis and/or MemCache
• Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis
• AWS or any other cloud platform
• Observability tooling (logs, metrics, etc)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Comprehensive experience Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes
• Ad Tech industry

Additional Information:

Working hours would need to closely overlap with PST. Candidates must be located close to a Disney tech hub.

The hiring range for this position in California is $180,646 to $265,430 per year and in Washington is $189,256 to $253,880 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.