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Senior Data Engineer

Apply Now Apply Later Job ID 10099405 Location Santa Monica, California, United States / Bristol, Connecticut, United States / San Francisco, California, United States / New York, New York, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States / Los Angeles, California, United States Business Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology Date posted Sep. 16, 2024

Job Summary:

Department/Group Overview:

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.

Commerce, Growth & Identity (CGI)

The Commerce, Growth & Identity (CGI) team is dedicated to three business-critical areas at Disney that will help transform its media business. They create seamless user experiences for consumers who can choose from a wide range of subscription plans, enabling more choice and flexibility. The CGI team is also focused on building innovative and cutting-edge capabilities that will drive subscriptions, engagement, and monetization across Disney’s streaming and digital products.

Job Summary:

The Search Machine Learning (ML) team powers the ML aspects of search engines for Disney+ and Hulu platforms, in a highly collaborative environment. ML-based services are embedded inside the entire life cycle of search journey, from query understanding, semantic retrieval, and engagement-based re-ranking of contents. Working closely with our core search counterpart team and product stakeholders, we are constantly testing new ideas, and bringing the proven ones into fruition, through experimentation.

In this role, you will be partnering closely with ML engineers/data scientists to help automate and manage their data needs for regular training, and online inference. You will be able to own the entire lifecycle of data pipelines, communicate your requirements with upstream DATA teams, bring your data engineering skills and ideas into life by engineering efficient data pipelines, and help supporting the feature requirements by the ML engineers/data scientists.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

  • Design and develop offline (batch)/near-line (streaming) data jobs.

  • Collaborate with ML and data practitioners to automate their pipelines.

  • Build tooling and low-latency services to enable and support event-driven

  • Ability to work on multi-faceted projects with engineers from diverse backgrounds, heterogenous skills and across teams.

  • Work in an Agile environment that focuses on collaboration and teamwork

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software experience, with 3+ years of relevant data and software experience.

  • Knowledge of the Python/Java data ecosystem.

  • Experience in building large datasets and scalable services

  • Experience deploying and running services in AWS, and engineering big-data solutions using technologies like Databricks, EMR, S3, Spark

  • Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases such as Redshift and Snowflake

  • Experience designing and developing backend microservices for large scale distributed systems using gRPC or REST.

  • Experience with large-scale distributed data processing systems, cloud infrastructure such as AWS or GCP.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Knowledge in optimizing Spark jobs.

  • Experience building streaming pipelines using Kafka, Spark, Kinesis

  • Mentor colleagues on best practices and technical concepts of building large scale solutions

Required Education

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work


The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA, Santa Monica, CA, and Bristol, CT is $136,100.00 - $182,400.00 per year, in Seattle, WA and New York, NY is $142,600.00 - $191,100.00 per year and in San Francisco, CA $149,000.00 - $199,800.00 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.

About Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at the vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

This position is with Disney Streaming Technology LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology.

Disney Streaming Technology LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

We will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable law.

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