Staff Software Engineer

About the Role & Team

Performance Marketing is an internal cross -functional team within The Walt Disney Studios Marketing organization. The performance Marketing uses developing and maturing ad technologies to achieve remarkable data-driven results within auction-based or otherwise addressable media platforms; they also support other paid media and marketing efforts with insights, recommendations, and innovative marketing technologies. Performance Marketing includes Marketing Technology and Marketing Science who help drive innovation, as well as units for Performance Marketing Strategy & Operations, Marketing Analytics, and Marketing Compliance who ground the overall team in the business. Together, we strive and collaborate for continuous improvement in advertising effectiveness and efficiency while protecting and enhancing the magical brands of The Walt Disney Studios!

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to sit in the Marketing Technology Unit, to create, experiment, and innovate with new media performance applications and automations. You'll get to understand the challenges of driving a highly data-driven and technically precise paid media strategy for a variety of titles and brand experiences, all while using the latest technologies and tooling in the data/tech space. If you're interested in working in a highly collaborative team environment embedded directly in a key business unit like this, please get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!

What You Will Do

• Design and build tools that support the existing ad technology teams at The Walt Disney Studios—collectively known as “the performance marketing engine”; allow the teams to scale their work, increase the rate of delivery, and make space for future innovation
• Drive software engineering and architectural best practices and standards within the team, along with a culture of engineering excellence; uphold standards and rigor around software development, testing, deployment, and documentation
• Provide mentorship and guidance for team members; evangelize the new tools, best-practices, and data driven decisions
• Develop and enhance existing capabilities of the Performance Marketing Engine
• Create tooling and applications that can dynamically manage ad strategy configurations in a variety of social and digital platforms
• Collaborate with data scientists and product managers to rapidly iterate from prototypes to high-quality, production pipelines; contribute to emerging marketing analytics projects that address pressing business questions from collaborators in The Walt Disney Studios Marketing organization
• Implement quality controls, monitoring, and other safeguards to ensure optimizations are accurately and safely applied to in-flight ad campaigns and key business metrics are always presented accurately
• Adapt applications and workflows in the Performance Marketing Engine to changes arising from industry-wide events (such as the iOS14 update or cookie deprecation) as well as to more customary changes like standard updates to partner APIs.
• Collaborate with Studio Technology team to ensure data fidelity and reenforce larger data initiatives at The Walt Disney Studios
• Lead efforts to design and create new and innovative enhancements to the Performance Marketing Engine to improve capabilities in: Categorizing and taxonomizing paid media efforts
• Implement paid media strategies at scale across multiple digital media channels
• Simplify media operations and improving operational efficiency

Required Qualifications & Skills

• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 7 years or more of related work experience
• Shown experience developing well-documented applications and API-based services, using frameworks such as FastAPI (Python) or Sprint Boot (Java)
• Experience with data-rich environments and a fluency with Python, Spark, and SQL
• Ability to craft and own CI/CD pipelines for applications, using infrastructure-as-code frameworks such as Terraform or CloudFormation
• Experience partnering with data science teams to bring pipelines and libraries into robust, production environments
• Ability to dive deep into any technical component as well as understand and drive the overall systems architecture.
• Proven ability to manage multiple projects effectively that meet deadlines within a fast-paced environment
• Understanding of media and marketing, including how to define marketing/ media KPIs

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of ad platforms including DMPs, Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Innovid, LiveRamp and DSPs (Google DV360, Trade Desk, Verizon Media Group)
• Familiarity with front-end software development, including Javascript and frameworks like Angular or React
• Knowledge of Databricks and AWS Cloud Services
• Knowledge of digital ad serving, tracking and implementation

Disability accommodation for employment applications

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, email Candidate.Accommodations@Disney.com with your request. This email address is not for general employment inquiries or correspondence. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

The Walt Disney Company is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.