Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally. 

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.  

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here: 

Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.  Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.   Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 

Commerce, Data & Identity provides the core product management functions for areas crucial to Disney’s media businesses. These include initiatives and products that power digital commerce, identity, and growth, as well as those that reach uniquely across The Walt Disney Company enterprise, such as messaging and privacy, among others. Additionally, it is responsible for the data engineering, science, and products for Disney Entertainment & ESPN, along with their interconnection with other parts of The Walt Disney Company.

The Product & Data Engineering team is responsible for end to end development for Disney’s world-class consumer-facing products, including streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and digital products & experiences across ESPN, Marvel, Disney Studios, NatGeo, and ABC News. The team drives innovation at scale for millions of consumers around the world across Apple, Android, Smart TVs, game consoles, and the web, with our platforms powering core experiences like personalization, search, messaging and data.

Job Summary:

Data Experience is a tightly-knit team working within the Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) Data department. We focus on building cutting-edge applications, reducing redundancy, and providing end-to-end solutions that optimize our business processes. While focused on full-stack application development, we often foray into platform connectivity, BI tools, and big-data visualizations.

As the business moves toward more data-driven decision making, the ability to access data easily becomes very important. In turn, we work closely with Data Science, Marketing, and Personalization teams to create one-of-a-kind applications that enable The Walt Disney Company to reach new heights of customer outreach and conversion. While we use known technologies to speed our development process, we also contribute to and push enterprise design and productivity through our innovative partnerships.

Using your skills and experience in full-stack development, you will join a fun team of technically capable individuals that pride themselves on delivering the highest quality product.  Most of our applications are written in a NodeJS/Typescript/React stack, but we are able to cover many languages and frameworks with our breadth of experience.  In this role, you will focus on our Near-Real-Time reporting and visualizations platform. The work is fun and challenging, and we are often asked to break new ground in terms of user experience and application functionality.

Join our small-but-mighty team in DE&E Technology and be a part of the magic!

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Design and build reliable backend systems using AWS services to handle extreme loads of traffic.
• Be involved in code and architecture reviews for team members.
• Provide minimal on-call support for critical services on a rotational basis.
• Own features and functionality and deliver projects end-to-end with high quality and robust architecture.
• Ramp up on new domains and technologies.
• Communicate effectively with team members including frontend SDK engineers, QA, and product.
• Participate in Agile methodology and SCRUM processes such as Sprint Planning, Backlog grooming, Daily Standups, and Retrospectives with the team.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years’ experience in backend server-side development including experience with Rest services, CICD and unit testing
• 5+ years working in Java (or similar object-oriented language) including experience with frameworks like Spring
• 5+ years’ experience working with AWS for builds, deployments and monitoring including the following technologies: ECS, MSK, S3, Lambdas, ALB
• Extensive experience with Kafka including administering clusters, streams, producers and consumers
• Familiarity with databases (SQL and no-SQL)
• Experience investigating technical components and taking ownership of feature development
• Experience programming in Java
• Experience building APIs
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, and continuous integration/delivery systems
• Experience developing mocking mechanisms for tests

Preferred Qualifications

• Expert level experience with Docker, Scala, Spark and Databricks
• Experience building systems that can handle billions of requests per week that have an impact on millions of daily users. In other words, experience with click streams/analytics
• Extensive experience developing with a mix of languages.
• Proficiency with agile development methodologies shipping features 
  every two weeks.
• Experience with Content Personalization/Recommendation, Audience 
  Segmentation, and/or Analytics.
• A robust portfolio on Github and / or open-source contributions you 
  are proud to share.

Required Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a closely related field with 5+ years of progressive experience in a software development (SDE) occupation, including automated testing of front end and backend services

The hiring range for this position in San Francisco, California is $155,400 to $208,400 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.