Manager, Software Engineering - Ad Platforms

The Ad Platform Engineering organization within Disney Entertainment and ESPN organization is fully responsible for building, enhancing and maintaining the high-performance, distributed, microservice-based Digital Advertising Platform. The platform is charged with the qualification, delivery, and tracking of Digital Advertising campaigns (Video on Demand, Live TV, and innovative interactive ads) across all of Disney online properties, including Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.

As part of Ad Platform Engineering, the Disney Campaign Manager team builds Disney’s self-service advertising portal. Empowering advertisers with seamless access to premium streaming inventory across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. It enables users to set up, launch, and optimize campaigns in real time through an intuitive dashboard that offers precise targeting, flexible budgeting, and performance analytics.

As Manager of Software Engineering, you will apply your deep technical knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, loosely coupled, encapsulated, and testable software.

On a daily basis you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems on architecture, design, and implementation

• Demonstrated project ownership

• System and API design, and implementation best practices to guide and mentor, for example, micro-service encapsulation and loose coupling

• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very challenging and complicated landscape

• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health

• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements 

• Kindness and pragmatic optimism

• A deep understanding of Java and the SDLC

• Experience building internal and external performant web based UIs

• Detailed understanding of database design and usage, including ORM

• Your unique view and experience

Responsibilities:

• Ensure the direction of your team, both from a design and implementation perspective, with a keen focus on ensuring interoperability, API design, and appropriate levels of encapsulation

• Reviewing a lot of code and tests

• Available for a weekly-rotating On-Call support schedule

• Reading requirements documentation from Product and translating into implementation tickets, and leading the team through execution

• Defining, reviewing, documenting, and estimating LOE for software and system designs in a high throughput, low latency microservices environment

• Defining and prioritizing sprintable work for your team, as well as working with other leads on cross-functional projects

• Enhancing system observability with proper metrics, monitors and alerts

• Regularly scheduled 1:1 meetings with team members to guide them through personal and career development

• Thoughtful annual reviews for direct reports

• Performance management

Basic Qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience

• Advanced proficiency with Java

• Proficiency with Javascript frameworks(React, node.js)

• Solid understanding of micro-service architecture

• Relational database design / implementation

• Demonstrable analytical / problem solving skills

• Great communication, collaboration skills and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences

• Demonstrated experience leading a software development team

Preferred Qualifications:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects, such as spring-data-jpa - if you don’t know these it’s OK, but we do expect you to learn and understand best practices for the frameworks we use

• Redis and/or MemCache

• Typescript

• Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis

• AWS or other cloud platform

• Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes

• Ad Tech industry

Required Education:

• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA and Santa Monica, CA is $171,600 to $230,100 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.