Sr Software Engineer

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.

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.

User Foundations

The User Foundations team builds critical User Capabilities that are shared across all experiences on the streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+. We implement reliable, high-throughput services and pipelines for gathering information about our users,and delivering personalized experiences. We're a fast-paced, dynamic, collaborative and fun team, and are looking for someone who can slot right in and start delivering from day 1.

Job Summary:

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance platforms.

To be successful in this role, you need effective communication and collaboration skills, a passion for learning and trying new things, and a strong foundational understanding of programming and computer science.

As a member 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.
• A sense of ownership of the projects delivered by your team and department
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast paced environment
• An understanding of how to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health and to manage risk.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements to our services
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• Your unique view and experience

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Actively participate in daily stand-ups and other scrum ceremonies.
• Design new solutions and drive alignment across engineering and product teams.
• Expertly break down work at the epic level, setting project milestones with reasonable deadlines.
• Prioritize work within a project to deliver on the most necessary or urgent requirements.
• Anticipate and mitigate risk on projects.
• Effectively communicate with stakeholders on project progress. 
• Write code to implement new features or optimize existing services.
• Determine the most efficient means to sufficiently test new code: unit tests, integration tests, performance tests, etc. 
• Set best practices for the team for on-call responsibilities such as deployments, monitoring, and investigating incidents 
• Use logs, monitoring tools, and work with developers to determine root causes across distributed components.
• Perform code reviews for members of the team, bearing a sense of responsibility for approved code. 

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience
• Understanding of message based distributed, scalable, and resilient systems
• Desire to work in a start-up, fast-growth, or rapid-change environment
• Experience working on diverse teams
• Problem-solving skills to identify the root cause and implement the fix.
• Solid communication skills – written, and oral
• Ability to be flexible, adapting to changing priorities
• Fluent in multiple programming languages and an expert in at least one of: JavaScript, Python, Java
• Experience transforming requirements into software design, documentation and software.

Preferred Qualifications

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects
• Non-relational database technologies e.g. DynamoDB
• Redis and/or MemCache
• Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis
• Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes
• Expert with at least one of: AWS, Azure, GCP
• Experience building, testing, and tuning distributed systems

Experience With

• Familiarity with the Scala programming language and popular 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), Terraform, and infrastructure as code (IaC) best practices.

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Minimum of 5 years related work experience.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, Washington and New York City is $142,516 - $191,180 per year and in Bristol, Connecticut, Santa Monica, California and Glendale, California is $136,100 - $182,400 per year and in San Francisco, California is $148,994 - $199,870 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.