Senior Principal User Platforms 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.

User Foundations

The User Foundations team builds critical User Capabilities that are shared across all experiences on the streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+. We implement reliable, high-throughput services and pipelines for gathering information about our users,and delivering personalized experiences. We're a fast-paced, dynamic, collaborative and fun team, and are looking for someone who can slot right in and start delivering from day 1.

Job Summary:

We are looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance platforms. To be successful in this role, you need effective communication and collaboration skills, a passion for learning and trying new things, and a strong foundational understanding of programming and computer science.

As a member of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software.

Things you’ll be working on:

• Identity patterns that can help the teams scale, create proposals, and drive adoption of those patterns

• Challenge current architectural choices while collaborating to solve problems in innovative ways

• Drive best engineering practices to write well-constructed and easy-to-maintain code, defensive and robust tests.

• Lead through metrics - understand application performance and costs and push for better results.

• Work with Product Management to help translate business requirements into Technical solutions - drive the delivery of key projects across the various cross functional teams 

• Lead architecture group to inspire change across the organization as well as partner organizations

• Represent Disney streaming in various internal and external conferences, blogs, mentor Senior engineers

What to bring

• 12+ years of related experience crafting large-scale, highly available Java services utilizing various database and messaging technologies.

• Strong programming skills in Java and other object-oriented languages, and a strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.)

• Experience using source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.

• An ability to work both independently and collaboratively.

• Champion cross-team projects.

• Coach and mentor other specialists on the team to ensure that all software utilizes Hulu and industry best practices for data persistence and real-time streaming applications.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Develop software designs and specifications

• Develops and writes code to meet design specifications

• Test, document and deploy code

• Provide technical mentorship, and code quality assurance

• Support, maintain and break-fix production products

• Work with a team to design solutions to various interesting and challenging problems

• Be a champion for engineering excellence

• Become and stay an expert in current and emerging technologies and tools

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience

• Understanding of message based distributed, scalable, and resilient systems

• Desire to work in a start-up, fast-growth, or rapid-change environment

• Experience working on diverse teams

• Problem-solving skills to identify the root cause and implement the fix.

• Solid communication skills – written, and oral

• Ability to be flexible, adapting to changing priorities

• Fluent in multiple programming languages and an expert in at least one of: JavaScript, Python, Java

• Experience transforming requirements into software design, documentation and software.

• Ability to coach teammates to become better engineers

• Ability to lead technical projects

Experience with:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects

• Non-relational database technologies e.g. DynamoDB

• Redis and/or MemCache

• Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis

• Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes

• Expert with at least one of: AWS, Azure, GCP

• Experience building, testing, and tuning distributed systems

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