Principal Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

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.

The Core Infrastructure Automation Team is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive the engineering and architecture direction of the automation tools for the provisioning, inventory and management of DE&E Technology infrastructure. This person will be a driving force in leading current and future architectural decisions to ensure the suite of automation applications continues to provide critical capabilities for the company. You will also encourage, mentor, and help other developers grow by teaching them the current architectural design, design patterns, and best developmental practices

Responsibilities

• Provide subject matter expertise on design and coding best practices and assisting in building and implementing related guidelines and standards.

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

• Maintain a deep understanding of our core systems and how they interact with upstream and downstream dependencies.

• Contribute and review code, set standards, and work with engineers to ensure product and design specifications are met.

• Partner with stakeholders to refine requirements and propose solutions to problems that span multiple teams.

• Influence and contribute to department technical strategy and planning.

• Provide mentoring to engineers on advanced technical issues.

• Lead cross-functional troubleshooting of complex issues as needed.

• Strategic planning and vision focused on experimenting with and deploying new technologies.

• Collaborate with leaders from other teams to ensure the planning and delivery of medium and large scale projects.

• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions.

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

Basic Qualifications

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

• 10+ years relevant industry experience.

• Has had a leading role in the design, implementation, and deployment of one or more high volume, cross-functional enterprise-level system.

• Has had a leading role in initiatives that span across one or more departments in your division.

• Extensive knowledge and experience with:

  • Source control systems and CI/CD pipelines (Git, Gitlab, Jenkins, or similar tools)

  • Messaging and caching technologies (Redis, AMQ, RabbitMQ, Varnish)

  • Cloud Compute, Networking and Storage technologies (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)

  • Container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, AKS)

  • Database systems (MongoDB, MySQL, MSSQL, Postgres)

  • Programming and scripting languages (Python, Powershell, Bash)

  • Designing APIs and building RESTful services

  • Modern infrastructure and site reliability engineering practices, including Infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g. Terraform, SALT, Ansible, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise with the full lifecycle of application development, including best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.

• Has worked on systems that automatically deploy bare metal systems at scale.

• Proficiency in monitoring and performance analysis tools such as Datadog, Splunk, Grafana or NewRelic.

• Experience using Node, JavaScript, React or other front-end technologies.

• Motivated self-starter with the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies.

• Can effectively articulate complex ideas and influence others through well-reasoned explanations.

• Strong communication skills and attention to detail.

• Enjoy working in a team setting with engineers of varying experience.

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