Director, Data Engineering

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.

The Product & Data Engineering team is responsible for end to end development for Disney’s world-class consumer-facing products, including streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and digital products & experiences across ESPN, Marvel, Disney Studios, NatGeo, and ABC News. The team drives innovation at scale for millions of consumers around the world across Apple, Android, Smart TVs, game consoles, and the web, with our platforms powering core experiences like personalization, search, messaging and data.

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 Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology Data Solutions team creates data products for our leading brands such as Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC. We sit at the intersection between data technology, entertainment and sports.

Job Summary:

As the Director of Data Engineering you would implement the product strategy for DEET’s media services. These data capabilities drive world class data capabilities for the organization. This position is responsible for the collection, transformation and delivery of data for many use cases – such as subscriber and product performance. Our products include analytical, machine learning, reporting and system feedback capabilities.

The Director will lead multiple high functioning data engineering teams delivering on the following mission to:

• Be the single source of truth for calculations and metrics
• Deliver a unified data model that allows clear slice across the organization.
• Enable self service analytics capabilities around product and business performance
• Build and support the data models and data pipelines that prepare the core data sets

The ideal candidate has significant data engineering and leadership background with demonstrated collaboration experience with engineers, business users, product managers and exec stakeholders.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Build high impact data products focused on business, analytical and ML use cases.
• Manage, build and grow the data engineering teams. Offer organizational design thinking to best structure the team and equip them for success in their goals
• Drive data architecture and systems planning
• Translate requirements between product management and business stakeholders
• Drive strong technical design and implementation practices with your engineering teams
• Define the vision and strategy for data engineering products and capabilities aligned to overall organizational and business objectives
• Promote and develop engineering best practices, guidelines, procedures and repeatable, agile and scalable frameworks
• Develop systems thinking focus for your teams including:
  • the creation of clear specifications framework,
  • architectural plan covering systems, data and solutions architectures,
  • acceptance criteria and success measures,
  • instrumentation and Service Level capabilities,
  • Quality tooling for test driven development and ongoing data quality testing in production,
  • Measurement of data storage/query cost,
  • Frame accessibility/usability tooling.
• Ensure products/solutions are built to address core business questions and operational needs, actively bring the product back to the business model and strategy
• Build a network. Establish and grow relationships with Disney Streaming executives and senior leaders across data, technology, product and business teams

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership skills and ability attract, build and develop successful engineering teams
• 12+ years in data or software engineering with significant team management.
• Successful track record of building data products and capabilities
• Highly analytical and collaborative qualities with strong technical, strategic and problem-solving skills
• Experience solving problems in an ambiguous environment
• Experience utilizing both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis techniques and familiarity with common data science models and approaches to problem solving. Generally: the ability to plan for what analysts and data scientists need to deliver successfully
• Ability to thrive in a dynamic and fast-paced operational environment, drive change, and collaborate with a variety of individuals and organizational partners
• Experience demonstrating leadership, self-motivation, accountability, and being a standout colleague.
• Executive-level communication skills including abstraction, summarization and conceptualization.
• Practical experience with agile methodologies and scrum
• Self-motivated with pragmatic approach to deliver quality solutions iteratively and intellectual curiosity to grow and learn

Preferred Qualifications

• Content / Media / Streaming / Social Media or similar industry experience
• Deep data experience
• Management or Strategy consulting background
• Knowledge of SQL and one or more big data warehouse technologies e.g. Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift
• Experience with delivering large scale enterprise applications using big data tech such as S3, Hadoop, Spark
• Experience or knowledge of No-SQL - DB’s - Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, Couchbase
• Experience building high performance data models and large distributed cube environments. Technologies such as Druid a big plus.
• Experience with reporting and visualization tools such as Tableau, Looker or other visualization tools

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Mathematics, or related field, or equivalent industry experience
• Master’s Degree a plus

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $199,000.00.00 to $266,800.00 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $217,900.00 to $292,200.00 per year, and in Seattle, WA and New York, NY is $208,400.00 to $279,500.00 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.