Senior Software Engineer

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.

Engineering Services designs, builds, and sustains technology that powers DE&E Technology’s worldwide content production and distribution platforms. In doing so, they contribute to a series of cross-functional services and technologies, including Quality Assurance, Data Analytics, Software Development, Broadcast Infrastructure, and Networking & Security.

Job Summary:

The Core Data & Services for the Data organization within the DEET organization is in search of a Senior Software Engineer.  As a member of the Core Data team you will help build out the code base that powers our foundational datasets and data pipelines.  You’ll spend time building and refining shared scala libraries to enable efficient reusable components that will be used across a multitude of deployments and produce foundational data for our streaming business.  The code that powers our foundational data pipelines and datasets is a vital key to success of our business – enabling dozens of engineering and analytical teams to unlock the power of data to drive key business decisions and provide engineering, analytics, and operational teams the critical information necessary to scale the largest streaming service.  Expanding, scaling, and standardizing the core foundational principles through consistent coding best practices, observability, lineage, data quality, logging, and alerting across all engineering teams within our organization is imperative to the creation of a single pane of glass.  The Core Data team is seeking to grow their team of world class Software Engineers that share their charisma and enthusiasm for making a positive impact!

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Contribute to maintaining, updating, and expanding existing source code that powers our Core Data platform in Scala and Python / Spark while maintaining strict uptime
• Extend functionality of current Core Data platform offerings, including metadata parsing, extending the platform metadata strategy, and building new integrations with APIs both internal and external to our organization
• Implement new software deployments based on requirements for both batch ingestion and stream processing using Scala and Python - deployed using Databricks and Airflow
• Modify by coding new features for shared libraries in Scala and Python that abstract complex business logic to allow consistent functionality across all modules across our organization
• Tech stack includes Airflow, Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Scala, Python
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and other engineers to drive the success of the Core Data platform
• Contribute to developing and documenting both internal and external standards and best practices for software configurations, naming conventions, partitioning strategies, and more
• Ensure high operational efficiency and quality of the Core Data platform deployments to ensure our solutions meet SLAs, project reliability, accuracy to all our stakeholders (Engineering, Data Science, Operations, and Analytics teams)
• Be an active participant and advocate of agile/scrum ceremonies to collaborate and improve processes for our team
• Engage with and understand our customers, forming relationships that allow us to understand and prioritize both innovative new offerings and incremental platform improvements
• Maintain detailed documentation of your work and changes to support both code and data quality as well as data governance requirements

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience developing large data pipelines
• Strong algorithmic problem-solving expertise
• Strong fundamental Scala and Python software engineering skills
• Basic understanding of AWS or other cloud provider resources (S3)
• Strong SQL skills and ability to create queries to analyze complex datasets
• Hands-on production environment experience with distributed engineering systems such as Spark and Kafka
• Hands-on production experience with orchestration systems such as Airflow
• Some scripting language (Bash, PowerShell) experience
• Willingness and ability to learn and pick up new skillsets
• Self-starting problem solver with an eye for detail and excellent analytical and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems preferred

• Experience with at least one major Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query)
• Experience in developing APIs with GraphQL
• 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