Manager, Software Engineering – Media and Playback Data Processing

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

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 Disney’s 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 maximize 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 for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

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

Job Summary:

The Data Platforms Team, a segment under the Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DEET) organization is looking for a Manager, Software Engineering to join our Media and Session Data team. Media consumption data is critical to improving products in the DEET Portfolio because it allows us to quantify content performance, measure advertising effectiveness, help users discover new content, detect fraud, and track user journeys. Overall, this data enables us to better understand the user playback experience so we can continue improving our service for our users, advertisers, and content partners. Our Media and Session Data Engineering team is seeking a highly motivated Manager of Software Engineering with a strong technical background who is passionate about designing and building systems to process data at scale, solving challenging problems in both batch and real-time data processing, and working across software and data disciplines to engineer solutions. Our tech stack includes primarily utilizes AWS, Databricks, Airflow, and Spark, and languages such Scala and Java.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Provide day-to-day leadership and management of the engineering teams that contribute to the design and growth of our Playback Data Products and Services, enabling evaluation of product performance and user behavior
• Participate and review the designs and implementations of scalable data warehousing solutions, building ETL pipelines in Big Data environments (cloud, on-prem, hybrid)
• Work on systems to query, process, and deliver data out of the analytics environment into internal tools and systems
• Collaborate on architectural designs and help plan for maintainability, observability, and future development concerns
• Maintain detailed documentation of your work and changes to support data quality and data governance
• Ensure high operational efficiency and quality of your solutions to meet SLAs and support commitment to our customers
• Be an active participant and advocate of agile/scrum practice to ensure health and process improvements for your team

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of software or data engineering experience
• At least 2-3 years of experience as an engineering manager
• Extensive knowledge and experience of the architecture and development of data pipelines and orchestration frameworks using platforms like Spark, Hadoop, Databricks, Airflow
• Experience with developing for a cloud environment (AWS preferred), including cloud databases (Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks Delta Lake)
• Knowledge of both SQL and NoSQL databases
• Strong programming skills in Java, Scala or Python
• Demonstrated competency in data modeling and analysis techniques
• Familiar with Scrum and Agile methodologies
• Strong attention to detail and excellent analytical skills
• Verbal and written communication skills and ability to collaborate with others effectively

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with at least one major Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query)
• Experience with scalable online analytical processing databases (Druid, ClickHouse)
• Experience doing hands-on data analysis of large fine-grained datasets
• Experience working with a test first mentality.
• Deep Understanding of AWS or other cloud providers as well as infrastructure as code
• Familiarity with Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices
• Familiar with Scrum and Agile methodologies

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