Job Requirements

Job Summary

As a Senior Software Engineering Manager in the Experimentation & Experience Controls team, you’ll lead several squads through their engineering leads, and set the direction for multiple domains within the WeaponX product.

You will be empowered to set technical and architectural direction, and to influence the roadmap for your squads and the wider organization - working in partnership with your peers across Product, Project Management and Engineering. You will collaboratively define the team’s OKRs, and ensure our work has a measurable impact on these objectives. 

You’ll be working on our high-scale in-house A/B testing and feature flagging product, capable of serving billions of requests with single digit millisecond response times. Deeply integrated into our platform to enable experimentation, feature, & release management, and real-time user targeting across multiple brands and products including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, & ABC.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Software Engineering Manager, you'll:

• Own the roadmap for your domains with your Product partner. You’ll decide on priorities together and take joint ownership of the OKRs.
• Represent engineering to the product teams at Disney+, Hulu, ESPN and ABC who leverage our platform. Make the trade-offs and reasoning clear, and be comfortable saying no.
• Drive adoption of experimentation and feature management across Disney, and the best practices that go with it. We measure scale by the teams using the platform well, as much as by the traffic it serves.
• Lead squads that own their services end to end, including in production. You’re accountable for reliability, on-call health and incident follow-through across your domains.
• Set and communicate the engineering vision for your squads, and make sure it lines up with the roadmap you own with Product and with the organization’s goals.
• Manage and mentor engineering leads and senior ICs, and stay close enough to the technical and architectural problems to challenge them.
• Build a diverse software development team through training, career development, recruiting, and process improvements. Creating an inclusive environment where people can do their best work.

Required Experience

• Strategic Alignment: Proven experience in gaining alignment across multiple teams & stakeholders  to deliver significant, enterprise-level products or features.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, especially in framing and simplifying complex technical requirements for business stakeholders.
• Leadership: Experience leading multiple agile teams that build and run large scale distributed systems.
• Experimentation & Platforms: Experience building or running a platform used by other engineering teams, and a working understanding of how A/B tests are designed and their results read.
• Scaling Delivery: A preference for delegating outcomes and empowering your team, but with the ability to be hands on when required.
• Engineering & AI: Experience leading teams that use AI across the delivery cycle, from planning through to release, and getting better quality and faster delivery as a result.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Proficiency with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Ambiguity: Comfortable working from loosely defined requirements, and leading conversations where our customers disagree with each other, or with us, about what the platform should do next.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• At least 10 years of experience in the software engineering field
• At least 3 year of experiences in a leadership or management role in technology

Other Relevant Skills

• Experimentation Tooling: Working knowledge of A/B testing and feature flagging platforms such as Statsig, LaunchDarkly, Optimizely, Eppo or Split, and the best practices that go with them.
• JVM Languages: Experience with a JVM language such as Java, Scala or Kotlin. Our platform is written in Scala.
• Distributed Systems: Experience building micro/web services - including REST and GraphQL.
• Data Modeling: Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, Aurora, or DynamoDB, with expertise in modeling and optimizing query performance.
• Advanced Data Platforms: In-depth experience with data warehouse and pipeline platforms, specifically Snowflake or Databricks.
• Real-time Data: Experience with streaming data platforms such as Kinesis or Kafka.
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience with Terraform or other IaC tooling.
• Coaching & Mentoring: Experience mentoring and coaching more junior engineers on both technical and soft skills.
• Community Contribution: Active contributions to the technical community through white papers, blogs, workshops, or conferences.

PAY TRANSPARENCY

The hiring range for this position in New York City is $200,400- $268,700 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.

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

To learn more about Disney's guidelines on the use of AI for candidates, click here.

Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. 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.

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The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

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