Sr Software Engineer

Ad Serving Engineering organization within Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution 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 and ESPN+.

In addition, Ad Serving teams collaborate in the development of supporting components, such as anti-ad fatigue systems, impression counting pipelines, and ad experience flows. We also work on integrations with critical services responsible for the correct pacing, targeting, and selection of ads.

As a member of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software.

On a daily basis you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.
• A sense of ownership of the projects delivered by your team and department
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast paced environment
• An understanding of how to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health and to manage risk.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements to our services
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• Your unique view and experience

Responsibilities:

Writing and reviewing code and tests

• Writing Java application code to execute on an array of Product initiatives for Disney’s ad serving systems
• Writing, contributing, and reviewing design and/or code implementation specifications
• Writing component level automated unit tests in Java to verify proper functionality
• Using the github Pull Request approval process to peer review applications and test written software code
• Use relational and non-relational databases, as well as AWS services (including but not limited to; Kinesis, DynamoDB, Kinesis, etc.) to write and review code and tests
• Analyze information to determine, recommend, and plan installation of a new system or modification of an existing system
• Determine system performance standards
• Modify existing software to correct errors, adapt it to new hardware, or upgrade interfaces and improve performance
• Store, retrieve, and manipulate data for analysis of system capabilities and requirements
• Develop or direct software system testing or validation procedures, programming, or documentation

Participating in a weekly-rotating On-Call support schedule

• Responding to PagerDuty and/or Datadog alerts for the systems managed by assigned team
• Reviewing application and/or service dashboards to see if there are potential problems and/or issues that need to be addressed
• Calling in other team members as needed

Reading requirements documentation from Product Teams and translating into implementation tickets

• Reviewing high-level product specifications written by the Products Teams and translate into actionable code implementation tickets for a team of software engineers
• Creating tickets for the engineering team for known optimizations, and/or pending integrations identified during development

Reviewing, learning, and documenting software and system designs in a high throughput, low latency microservices environment

• Reading through code and documentation to learn how each relevant system works in the Disney ad server and which AWS services the systems use
  • The Disney ad server is composed of many different micro-services, each has their own implementation and design
• When creating new services, add learnings to the generation of code comments and wiki documentation for other teams and team members
• Confer with systems analysts, engineers, programmers and others to design systems and to obtain information on project limitations and capabilities, performance requirements and interfaces

Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors and alerts

• Using Datadog, adding to existing in-code custom metrics that are missing and/or needed as products and businesses change over time
• Using Datadog, adding new in-code custom metrics when creating new application code or enhancing existing code to meet business observability needs

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience
• 5+ years of software engineering experience
• Proficiency with Java
• Demonstrable analytical / problem solving skills
• Great communication, collaboration skills and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences

Preferred Qualifications:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects
• Non-relational database technologies e.g. DynamoDB
• Redis and/or MemCache
• Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis
• AWS or other cloud platform
• Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes
• Ad Tech industry

The hiring range for this position in California is $137,038 – 182,490 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.