Principal Software Engineer, Personalization & Recommendations

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.

• 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.

Job Summary:

This Principal Software Engineer, Personalization and Recommendations is a position within the Engagement Experiences & Platforms team of The Walt Disney Company’s Entertainment and ESPN Technology group.

This role reports to Data Team Lead, Personalization and Recommendations.

This is a hands-on engineering position developing recommendation systems for personalized, data-driven experiences. In this role, you will work with a cross-functional team to conceptualize and develop world-class Disney apps. Based on your experience, you will apply technical expertise to manage individual project priorities, deadlines and deliverables and will design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance software solutions.

If hired, you will play a meaningful role in the evolving experiences across consumer facing digital products, with responsibilities for the technical design and implementation of large size projects and features.

We are looking for you if you are

• Highly adaptable and committed to learning

• Have a track record of delivering solutions utilizing Python

• Thrive in an agile and collaborative environment.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Build data pipelines required for optimal extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a wide variety of data sources

• Explore and experiment with the latest visualization libraries and technologies and choose the right tools to support our data visualization use cases

• Work with stakeholders including the Executive, Product, Data and Design teams to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.

• Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software

• Participate in the design and implementation of core Platforms and Content Distribution systems

• Collaborate with internal & external teams to define requirements and delivery schedules for projects

• Design and deliver high quality code for small to medium size projects and make critical contributions working with others on larger projects

• Work with the team to iteratively improve development practices and processes

• Build strong relationships with the team while collectively finding opportunities for improvements around quality and automation

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• BS, BA, or advanced degree in computer science, engineering or its equivalent

• 10+ years hands-on professional experience with back-end systems design and development

• Robust programming skills and strong experience with Python

• Experience with the following technologies is a plus: AWS, Python Asyncio, FastAPI, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Postgresql, serverless computing

• Experience with working on ML based products and designing data pipelines is a plus

• Comprehensive understanding of HTTP/S, APIs, and web services

• Exposure to full lifecycle of application development, including practices like continuous integration, unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.

• Ability to collaborate in a small, productive development team as well as the larger engineering organization

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

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; can effectively articulate complex ideas and influence others through well-reasoned explanations

• Write efficient, reliable, and maintainable code whether implementing architectural improvements, user-facing features, or fixing defects

• Troubleshoot and resolve issues, problems, and errors encountered across our various platforms

• Analyze and optimize application code for efficiency, reliability, and performance

• Understand product architecture, assisting other Software Architects as necessary

• Manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced, deadline-oriented environment

• Embrace a highly collaborative team that rewards quality code and effective communication

• Interest in industry trends on new technologies, best practices and solutions. A passion for innovation and raising the bar in all development aspects.