Software Engineer II

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms. As a Software Engineer II with our Ad Platforms group, you will use your deep Java, Scala, Python, scripting, DevOps, and data persistence skills to write and test code that delivers new features for our application portfolio. You will be an important part of a motivated team where we’ll be looking for you to collaborate with the team to contribute to application architecture, code quality, and make sure we are building the right things for our users. The ideal candidate would possess solid skills in big data technology (Spark and Flink), while having expertise with orchestration and containerization platforms (Airflow, Docker and Kubernetes), preferably coupled with hands on persistence and data streaming technology experience (Databricks, Snowflake, Redis, Kafka).

While Disney is a large company, ideally, we’d like if you have some previous experience in a U.S. startup environment and be comfortable performing multiple roles. We strive to get things done quickly, with high quality, and we are committed to the agile methodology. Our work is guided by lean principles (looking at value and looking for waste; not doing anything ‘for the sake of doing it’).

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Build components of large-scale data platform for real-time and batch processing, and own features of big data applications to fit evolving business needs

• Build next-gen cloud based big data infrastructure for batch and streaming data applications, and continuously improve performance, scalability and availability

• Contribute to the best engineering practices, including the use of design patterns, CI/CD, code review and automated test

• Chip in ground-breaking innovation and apply the state-of-the-art technologies

• Contribute to all aspects of the software lifecycle: design, experimentation, implementation and testing

• Collaborate with team to develop software architectures which are robust, fault-tolerant, and cloud-native

• Possess AWS managed service solution design and implementation experience

• Reason logically and creatively, identifying problems, drawing valid conclusions from the data available, and develop effective solutions while applying creative thinking in the design and development of high performing data applications

• Collaborate with fellow engineers to keep the team’s technology radar and architecture principles aligned to the industry and needs of our users

• Deliver multiple projects utilizing an Agile methodology

• Take a high ownership, self-sufficient, hands-on position on the team to collaborate and drive quality, maintain application stability

• Write complex programs, analyze code changes and suggest improvements

• Check-in valuable, clean code on a daily basis that adds new features and capabilities

• Investigate and resolve any production issues from end user to persistence layer and work to prevent them

• Work with leads, product managers, service teams, and managers to ensure that all project deliverables are on time and high quality

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Engineering, or another technical field

• 3+ years of experience in big data application development in a large enterprise environment using Java, Scala, Python, including familiarity with modern frameworks and platforms (e.g., Spark, Flink, Singlestore, Kafka, Nifi and AWS big data technologies)

• Demonstrated experience working with relational databases, SQL and newer NoSQL data stores as well as event streaming platforms

• Demonstrated ability with cloud infrastructure technologies, including Terraform, K8S, Spinnaker, IAM, ALB, etc.

• Have a strong interest in open source technology

• Knowledge of building highly available and scalable services

• Passion about technologies and openness to interdisciplinary work

• Possess good communication skills and enjoy helping others to succeed as a team

• Care about your craft and have opinions about the “right” way to do things with technology

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related technical discipline is desirable

• Previous work experience in advertising industry-based applications

• Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Presto, Kinesis, etc.

• Experience working with vendor teams to deliver high quality results

• Knowledge of performance testing and application profiling

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $114,900 to $154,100 per year, in Glendale, CA is $114,900 to $154,100 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $125,800 to $168,700 per year, in Seattle, WA is $120,300 to $161,300 per year, and in New York, NY is $120,300 to $161,300 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.