Lead Software Engineer

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 redefining 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 improve 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.

• 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 implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

This role is part of the Tools and Operations Engineering Team within the DE&E Business Operations organization. Our group is passionate about creatively building the best solutions to solve complex business problems. Individuals interested in joining our organization should be highly motivated and committed to lifelong learning and improving, both in and out of the office. We strive to be flexible and adaptable to change, whether in the execution of projects or in the technologies we use to deliver our solutions. Members of this highly collaborative team rely on transparency, valuing the trust and relationships that evolve organically because of honesty and openness from both management and your peers. Success is not measured by individual accomplishments, but by the creation of innovative solutions delivered as a result of effective partnerships.

Job Summary:

As a Lead Software Engineer, the thing that sets you apart from other software engineers is your higher level of leadership and experience in addition to your ability to solve complex technical and business problems with very little guidance while ensuring alignment with company and team values and objectives. In addition, you may be responsible for leading other engineers and having direct reports who are either full-time employees or contractors. As such, part of your responsibility is to assist with the administrative responsibilities of interviewing, leading, mentoring, and assisting your team with accounts, access, knowledge, adherence to company policies, and conducting 1:1s. While your leadership responsibilities will be greater than that of a Senior-level engineer, your primary focus is still as an individual contributor working to accomplish technical tasks through the application of your own engineering skills, delegating to others where possible and appropriate.

We’re looking for someone with a proven track record and experience. You will lead by example by developing and following crucial, efficient, and effective best practices within your team related to the discipline of data engineering. Our goal is to create an inclusive, cohesive, and productive team, built on trust and enthusiasm – and we want you to help build that culture! Your work will directly support areas such as Data Management, Knowledge Graph, Business Intelligence, Service Management and Financial Management.

As a Lead Software Engineer, your main goal is to help the company get more value out of its applications by developing solutions to make them as useful, accurate, and secure as possible. To get this job done, you will work with a variety of programming languages such as Python, SQL, JavaScript, or other emerging languages and frameworks that you may need to learn on-the-fly. You will also be required to leverage and develop many cloud services within AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud to deliver solutions. You will be building applications that leverage the power of generative AI models to create entirely new forms of interactions in these areas. You will be looked to as an expert in the proper architecture and development of generative AI capabilities that leverage and organize data from multiple domains, databases and systems. Often, you will be required to create, enhance, and maintain mission-critical application models or reports that are used for analytics by multiple departments. Keeping your skills sharp through continuing education or certifications is an essential part of being on our engineering team.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Role-Specific Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership.
• Lead the design of solutions within the team to deliver on business and user requirements.
• Contribute to code writing, development, and testing while providing leadership towards the completion of solutions.
• Mentor and coach more junior members of the team helping to improve their skills, knowledge and productivity.
• In this role, you will work with Service Management, Financial Management, and Service Portfolio data, preparing it for model integration to support Generative AI applications unlocking new use cases for the Org and the Company.
• Be the Security Champion, ensuring data security is at the center of all solutioning
• Optimizing GenAI pipelines and models to improve quality and reduce computational time, cost.
• If necessary, assist in the interviewing, onboarding, mentorship, day-to-day leadership, 1:1s, and offboarding of any full-time and/or contractor personnel reporting to you.

General Responsibilities:

• Design, write, test and deploy code to develop and support solutions.
• Operate in a dynamic, quickly changing business environment, typically with little direct guidance, seek information on your own or in your team to understand complex integrations and challenges, and ideate innovative and creative solutions to navigate difficult obstacles and solve problems for the organization.
• Contribute towards the end-to-end lifecycle of data solutions by engaging in activities such as: ideation, prototyping, building proofs of concept, research, design, architecture, planning, development, deployment, testing, documenting, maintaining, monitoring, fixing, upgrading, migrating, deprecating, and retiring systems or features.
• Conduct research, discovery, prototyping, proof of concept implementation, and design concepts in order to prove and test ideas with end-users.
• Participate in the technical evaluation and understanding of business needs to help gather requirements and provide estimates regarding the level of technical effort for various business needs.
• Reviews code for correctness, and its impact on software and data architecture.
• Maintain and sustain data solutions by identifying and fixing defects or quality gaps, perform system upgrades and migrations, and seek to improve on how we deliver value through iterative improvements.
• Leverage Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment disciplines to streamline the deployment of code and to conduct quality engineering practices such as linting, code formatting, documentation, unit testing, integration testing, pipeline automation, etc.
• Responsibilities as assigned, to include assisting with user onboardings to data platforms, database administration work such as managing credentials, roles, permissions, monitoring costs and usage, or running administrative commands.
• Participate, if required, in regular sustainment rotations within the team, typically during business hours only, in which you share responsibilities of detecting and fixing system defects with others on your team.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Education Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Science, or a relevant field.
• Preferred: Relevant certifications for data engineering related to SQL, Python, Data Warehousing, DBA, AWS or CICD certifications.

Role-Specific Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in a Software Engineering discipline.
• Experience in technical leadership or management.
• Experience working with the Snowflake data warehouse or similar.
• Experience with big data processing ETL or ELT technologies (especially Glue, Step Functions, ECS, Docker, CloudWatch, S3, SNS, SQS, etc.).
• Experience in Database design, development, testing, upgrading, and migration of OLAP and OLTP systems.
• Experience and proficiency with SQL, and JavaScript.
• Experience in dimensional modeling, design and development of star schemas, normalization techniques, role-based security and account provisioning, modeling techniques.
• Familiarity with version control systems, CI/CD practices, testing
• Experience working in an agile/scrum team environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and Java
• Experience with designing and developing microservices architecture.
• Experience or awareness with large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models.
• Experience with observability tools like Datadog and similar.
• Experience with AI frameworks like Langchain, or similar.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $159,500 to $213,900 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.