Lead Solutions Engineer - Ad Platforms

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 Role Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DEET) Ad Platforms is responsible for delivering global advertising technology solutions for Disney's Linear & Addressable channels, brands and streaming services. With unmatched scale, premium content and innovative capabilities, we are a market leader in advertising. We build and maintain proprietary technology, ranging from ad serving and ad delivery, campaign management, reporting as well as all the integrations – internal and external – that come with evolving and maintaining a best-in-class video advertising business.

As a Lead Ad Platform Technical Operations Solutions Engineer supporting the Ad Platforms technology team at Disney, you are a part of a high-performing team redefining TV advertising. We’re seeking an ambitious Solutions Engineer who will be responsible for owning day-to-day technical operations for the creative transcoding pipelines at DEET. Our successful candidate enjoys solving complex & technical problems, is an innately investigative thinker, works with a sense of urgency, has experience with critical service operations and strives to provide a high standard of customer satisfaction in high-volume, production environments. The team is fast moving and requires you to translate technology solutions into business impact, while efficiently working with developers, sales, product and operations. For this particular role, you should be well-versed in ad technology and distributed systems and comfortable getting into the details of operational mechanics. You will be accountable for the monitoring, health and stability of our ad ingestion, validation and asset review communication queues.

Responsibilities

• Assist with owning day-to-day technical operations for the Ad Platforms Technical Operations team.

• Ensure monitoring and alerting on production services are in place, and be available on-call for production incidents and new product launches

• Triage, respond to and de-escalate inbound escalations (tickets) in a timely manner while maintaining a high standard of professionalism and client satisfaction

• Investigate complex issues, diagnose product bugs, and resolve requests

• Help develop strong partnerships with sales, support, engineering, product management and Standards & Practices leaders to drive focus on strategic and tactical channel objectives

• Maintain detailed support documentation for both internal and external use to strategically identify, distribute and execute Disney’s Standards and Practices

• Contribute to the development of best practices, team processes, and peer training of asset ingestion and review processes

Who You Are

• You’re a strong communicator who understands the core principles of advertising technology; preferably with focus in video.

• Highly motivated self-starter with the ability to work well individually and as part of a team. Have a “do what it takes” attitude.

• Ability to think on your feet during challenging situations, adaptable to change, and thrive in a fast-paced environment

• Experience shipping multiple products and features in an agile software development environment

• Impeccable written and verbal communication, time management and organizational skills

• Strong analytical skills and passionate about answering questions with data

• Excited to work in a high-growth and magical company!

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or relevant years of experience required. Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or in a related discipline preferred.

• 7+ years of experience working on ad-serving workflows in an enterprise Ad Server like Google Ad Manager, Freewheel or similar system.

• Experience in ad technology, operations, support or incident management.

• Strong grasp of online video and display advertising and monetization.

• Solid understanding of technical video, XML, VAST 2.0, VAST 3.0 and transcoding processes.

• Working knowledge of digital video experience and/or digital asset management. Deep understanding of technical video and audio specifications (e.g. video bitrates and codecs.

• Fluency in SQL. Experience with AWS Athena, DynamoDB, MySQL, Snowflake, or Hive

• Working knowledge of monitoring platforms (Cloudwatch, Datadog, Pagerduty or similar platforms)

• Experience managing a support ticket queue in JIRA, Zendesk, or similar system

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA is between $136,100 – 182,400 year, Seattle, WA or New York, NY is between $142,600 – 191,100, in San Francisco is between $149,000 – 199,800. 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.