Principal Software 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 Content Experience & Delivery team builds systems that provide data at scale to teams across Disney+, Hulu, and Star+. We implement reliable, high-request services that deliver data that helps power streaming user experiences, across web, mobile, and living room devices. We are looking for a software engineer who wants to build and operate these critical services that support all of our users!

We're a fast-paced, dynamic, collaborative and fun team, and looking forward to finding out more about you!

You'll join a hardworking group of engineers who strive to create the best-in-class Recommendations & Discovery experiences for hundreds of millions of customers across Disney+, Hulu, ABC and ESPN.  You will collaborate with Data Science/ML and Product teams to innovate on, develop and operate Recommendation Systems at scale.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will collaborate closely with engineers, project managers, and product managers to find the best solution for our viewers. You will drive projects end-to-end: designing the initial solution; finding alignment with stakeholders; execution of the necessary code; and overseeing the deployment of services to production. Members of the team look to your code and documentation as examples of What To Do. You value good-faith collaboration, driving best practices, and promoting excellence on your team. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you!

Responsibilities:

• Independently drive and champion cross-team projects.
• Expertly break down work at the initiative and epic levels, setting project milestones with reasonable deadlines.
• Design new solutions and ensure alignment across engineering and product teams.
• Prioritize work within a project to deliver on the most necessary or urgent requirements.
• Write code to implement new features or optimize existing services.
• Effectively communicate with stakeholders on project progress.
• Anticipate and mitigate risk on projects.
• Determine the most efficient means to sufficiently test new code: unit tests, integration tests, performance tests, etc.
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation for our tier-1 critical services facing millions of users worldwide. 
• Use logs, monitoring tools, and work with developers to determine root causes across distributed components.
• Set best practices for the team for on-call responsibilities such as deployments, monitoring, and investigating incidents
• Perform code reviews for members of the team, bearing a sense of responsibility for approved code.
• Coach and mentor teammates in an open, respectful, flexible, empathetic manner. Help onboard new team members.
• Actively participate in daily stand-ups and other scrum ceremonies.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years of related experience crafting and operating backend services.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 3+ years of related experience crafting and operating large-scale, high-availability backend services.
• Experience with algorithms and ML model implementation & operation at scale for consumer facing experiences.
• Demonstrated knowledge crafting and operating JVM services.
• Proven track record of designing and driving consensus on backend architectures.
• Demonstrated knowledge of asynchronous programming.
• Demonstrated knowledge of object-oriented programming patterns.
• Demonstrated knowledge of functional programming patterns.
• Demonstrated knowledge of source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.
• 1+ years experience operating within a Public Cloud Provider (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, Grafana)
• Ability to design and understand high-level architecture and frameworks as well as dive deep into individual technical components and systems.
• Ability to pragmatically drive technical projects with an analytical and data-driven approach.
• Demonstrated knowledge of AGILE/Scrum practices.
• Skilled at work breakdown and task estimation.
• Strong communication skills and a desire to share your knowledge with team members and others across Disney Streaming.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated knowledge of messaging technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, etc.)
• Experience working with remote global teams and a flexible schedule to meet in different time zones.

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