Lead Software Engineer

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

Job Summary:

Are you passionate about working on large-scale, high-performance software systems with a strong focus on service reliability? Join our team as a Lead Software Engineer dedicated to ensuring the availability, scalability, and resilience of our cloud-based services. In this role, you’ll leverage your expertise in service reliability and cloud platforms to create scalable solutions that support the entire Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products segment. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, offering technical expertise to develop products and tooling, while ensuring the smooth delivery of features and capabilities for the Data Platform and Products team, ultimately enhancing the magic of our guests' experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Service Reliability: Establish key service-level indicators (SLIs) and continuously monitor them to ensure system reliability, availability, and performance. Proactively develop alerts and automated responses to prevent service degradation or outages.
• Lead Cross-Functional Projects: Drive complex projects across multiple teams and disciplines, ensuring high availability, resilience, and minimal downtime of services.
• Root Cause Analysis & Incident Response: Conduct deep analysis of system issues, identify root causes, and define actionable strategies for remediation. Lead post-mortem analysis and continuous improvement efforts.
• Infrastructure & System Optimization: Focus on the high availability, scalability, and performance of services in production environments, ensuring they meet business and customer needs.
• Capacity Planning & Right-Sizing: Lead efforts to ensure that services are properly scaled for current and future workloads. Engage in capacity planning to optimize resource utilization.
• Documentation & Runbooks: Maintain detailed documentation and create robust runbooks for incident management and troubleshooting, ensuring smooth responses to service disruptions.
• Cloud Infrastructure & IaC: Utilize tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to manage and automate infrastructure as code (IaC) in a cloud-native environment.
• Service Monitoring & Observability: Oversee observability and monitoring across the platform (AWS, serverless, containers, Snowflake, etc.), ensuring actionable insights are available for operational teams.
• Collaboration with Development Teams: Work closely with developers to ensure that applications are designed for service reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
• GitOps-Driven Environment: Drive infrastructure changes and service deployment using GitOps practices to ensure consistency and traceability in deployments.
• Code Quality: Write clean, performant, and well-documented application code with a focus on reliability and service availability.
• Automation & Tooling: Build and maintain automated deployment pipelines and tooling for monitoring and platform testing.
• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers and assist in technical decision-making and code reviews.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 7+ years of experience in software development, with at least 3 years focused on service reliability, data management, and distributed systems.
• Technical Expertise: Expert-level coding skills in Python, with a deep understanding of performance and resource optimization, including considerations of space and time complexity.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Strong experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS Fargate, S3, VPC, Kinesis, EventBridge, and related components.
• Serverless & Containers: Proven experience in working with serverless (AWS Lambda) and containerized environments (Docker, ECS, EKS).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with IaC tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to automate infrastructure management.
• CI/CD & DevOps: Extensive experience in CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and general DevOps practices for continuous integration and deployment.
• Observability: Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools such as DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, or similar suites.
• Agile & DevOps: Strong proponent of Agile methodologies and application of DevOps principles for continuous improvement.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Certifications in AWS, Snowflake, or relevant service reliability tools.
• In-depth experience with observability suites and Application Performance Management (APM) tooling such as DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, etc.

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The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA is $152,200.00 - $204,100.00 per year and in Seattle, WA is $159,500.00 - $213,900.00 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.