Manager, Database Reliability Engineering

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 technology 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 Database Reliability Engineering (SRE) team helps elevate SRE practices as it applies to Database Management technology and services at TWDC, promoting and onboarding new technologies, solving complex problems and integrating with next generation digital platforms.  

Database Reliability Engineers (DPRE) use a software engineering approach to architect, design, automate, monitor, and build applications at scale. This includes operating and engineering software with close business segment alignment to deliver platforms through efficient, effective and resilient architectures. DBREs are talented engineers that are focused on improving quality through a data driven approach: instrumentation, automation, and functional/unit testing.

The Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) team is a group of highly trained professional database engineers who build, deploy and operate database platforms in an SRE/DevOps manner.  This team is responsible for operating the following platforms: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, Mongo, and Snowflake for TWDC.  These workloads are running in all major CSPs as well as on premises hosting environments.  This team manages the data platforms that operate some of the more critical Disney applications and services.

Responsibilities of Role:

• The Manager of Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) will be responsible to build and manage a team of high performing Database reliability engineers, supporting a variety of complex systems, infrastructure and application for The Walt Disney Company.  Database Reliability Engineers use a software engineering approach to architect, design, automate, monitor, and build applications at scale. This includes operating and engineering software with close business segment alignment to deliver platforms through efficient, effective and resilient architectures.

• The Manager of DBRE is responsible for clearly communicating a vision to the team that defines the team’s purpose, ownership, contribution and commitment to Disney excellence and a business enabling DevOps culture.  This person directly oversees, mentors and develops DBREs on technical leadership, reliability engineering, agile project management, design engineering, software engineering, architecture, problem analysis, customer service, optimization and collaboration.

• The Manager of DBRE will be responsible for technical analysis, cost and effort estimation, production environment platform/system design, architectural fit and compliance, resource schedules, delivery milestones, collaboration with other engineering managers, and overall production environment quality.  This person will lead a team of engineers in a fast paced dynamic environment. The Sr manager of DBRE reports to a Director with responsibilities including career management and setting the operational direction for areas of ownership

Must Haves:

• 8 years of experience (technical) with the following DBMS platforms Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, Snowflake and Mongo

• Experience (technical) with Managed Database platforms provided by major Cloud Service Providers (CSP): AWS RDS, Azure Managed Databases

• Leadership experience managing technical teams operating DBMS platforms, specifically those mentioned above

• Excellent written and verbal communications, proven ability to develop and deliver presentations geared for Senior and Executive Management

• Strong interpersonal communication skills and proven experience managing teams in highly matrixed organizations

• Understanding of programming languages such as Python, Go, C++, Ruby, or JAVA

• Proven ability to manage budgets

• Experience with web application development platforms, tools and utilities

• Understanding of configuration management frameworks such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt

• Experiencing managing multiple hosting environments including public and private cloud solutions.

• Experience with scripting infrastructure with tools like Terraform or Cloud Formation

Nice To Haves:

• 8 years of experience (technical) with the following DBMS platforms MS SQL.

• Experience with Linux and Windows based systems

• Experience with Kubernetes based systems

Education:

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

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