Sr Software Engineer

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.

DEET Messaging Platform Engineering team

• This role is on our DEET Messaging Platform Engineering team. Our mission is to empower personalized experiences and data that drive engagement, revenue, growth, customer delight and brand trust for all of The Walt Disney Company. Our product, the Unified Messaging Platform, helps us keep our guests informed and engaged with content, experiences and brands as diverse as Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, ABC, ESPN, and NatGeo.

Job Summary:

• The Messaging Platform at Disney Streaming powers all communications to users across Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Star+. With the volume of users across these streaming applications, our team is uniquely positioned to design, build, and maintain a feature-rich robust platform that scales for high volumes of traffic. Our platform consists of Java systems fully deployed in AWS across multiple regions, leveraging modern tools and design principles.

• Emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS texts originate without our platform to support critical user flows, standard business operations, and marketing/promotional campaigns. At the highest level, our Messaging domain includes message template creation/management, hydrating messages with static and dynamic content per recipient, the delivery of messages, and exposing the lifecycle of each message so that other teams can understand the effectiveness of the communications they trigger through our platform.

• The Messaging Routing & Insights squad is looking for an enthusiastic team player to fill our senior software engineer role. You will collaborate with experienced engineers on cutting-edge solutions, making major enhancements to our multi-region, multi-tenant core messaging platform to enable other Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology engineering teams to build solutions that send messages via email, push notification, SMS and in-app experiences. You will be involved in designing, building, launching and evolving a unified messaging platform that will encapsulate the very best of TWDC.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Build and maintain product-driven initiatives to improve and expand the Unified Messaging Platform, Enhance/improve the underlying codebase to be extensible, reusable, and maintainable. Actively participate in code reviews, offering constructive feedback to improve code quality, system reliability, and performance

Lead the design & enhancement of critical services in UMP, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability. Research and integrate new technologies into the production environment to optimize core service offerings. Collaborate with your squad, Product Managers, Designers, QA, Operations, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and articulate technical decisions and outcomes.

Promote team support activities such as participating in regular Agile/Scrum ceremonies such as stand-up, retrospectives and sprint planning; provide technical guidance to junior team members, covering code quality, system design, and best practices in software development.

Scheduled on-call duty

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building internet-scale web or services applications

• Experience in a Java and/or alternative JVM application development environments (Scala/Kotlin)

• Familiarity with the AWS environment (awareness of ECS (Docker), S3, EC2, Lambda, CloudWatch, etc)

• Solid understanding with software development fundamentals

• Proficiency with writing unit, integration and functional tests

• Experience with Relational and NoSQL Databases like Postgres, MySql, DynamoDB, Cassandra

• Proficiency with standard CI/CD procedures & tools like Jenkins, Github Actions, Spinnaker

• Familiarity with service APIs and/or SDKs

• Understanding of agile processes, software version control & project management tools (e.g. Github, SVN, Jira, Basecamp)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience or certification with AWS services, including S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Lambda, CloudWatch, or other cloud platforms (Azure, GCP)

• Familiarity with big data technologies & tools like Spark, Databricks, EMR

• Familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure as code tooling

• Experience building scalable, fault-tolerant, high-uptime systems

• Creative and inventive problem solving

• Desire and initiative to mentor other developers

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with SES or Salesforce Marketing Cloud

• Experience with Serverless solutions

• Familiarity with the Scala programming language and the Python programming language

Required Education  

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

• Minimum of 5+ years related work experience

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $148,700 to $199,400 per year, Santa Monica, CA is $141,900.00 to $190,300.00 and in San Francisco, CA is $155,400.00 to $208,400.00 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.