Principal Data 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 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.

The Product & Data Engineering team is responsible for end to end development for Disney’s world-class consumer-facing products, including streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and digital products & experiences across ESPN, Marvel, Disney Studios, NatGeo, and ABC News. The team drives innovation at scale for millions of consumers around the world across Apple, Android, Smart TVs, game consoles, and the web, with our platforms powering core experiences like personalization, search, messaging and data.

This role involves building and maintaining our Audience Manager Platform (AMP), a centralized Disney audience data platform that captures & processes all Disney consumers cross channel behavior and delivers varying summarizations in a timely manner to multiple endpoints to support all business needs.  At its core, it is a product that provides a comprehensive source of truth for customer data.  It is built around customer profiles and is able to provide insights from across the business so stakeholders can quickly act on the data through activation pipelines

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance data 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.

Responsibilities:

• Work with a distributed team of engineers across multiple products building software collaboratively.

• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects

• Collaborate with business partners to understand and refine requirements

• Eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel

• Ramp up quickly on existing software to deliver incremental, integrated solutions in a complex environment

• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting

• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions

• Participate in the code review process by assessing pull requests

• Support systems and services during production incidents as part of the on-call rotation

• Author and recommend technical proposals and root cause analyses

• Provide mentoring and advice for other specialists

• Establish engineering practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence

• Represent the DEET technical community at presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

Basic Qualifications:

• 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 10 years of related big data engineering experience modeling and developing large data pipelines and platforms

• Hands-on experience with distributed systems such as Spark, Hadoop (HDFS, Hive, Presto, PySpark) to query and process data

• Expert in Python and SQL skills processing big datasets

• A  strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.)

• Experience with at least one major MPP or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query, Databricks)

• Expert in Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices

• You are a problem solver with strong attention to detail and excellent analytical and communication skills

• In-depth experience with Cloud technologies like AWS (S3, ECS, EMR, EC2, Lambda, etc.)

• Solid experience with data integration toolsets (i.e Airflow), CI/CD

• Experience using source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proficient with Scrum and Agile methodologies

• Experience directly managing and mentoring a team.

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