Lead Data Systems Engineer

Staff Data Operations Engineer

At Disney, we're storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt's passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we're constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

This role is on the Data Platform Engineer Team. We are responsible for providing day-to-day management and oversight of the technologies/services supporting numerous data & analytic platforms across the Enterprise. The team is responsible for data analytics domains including financial, HCM, Legal, Tax, and Intellectual Property. There are 4 distinct areas within the group, Data Integration, Data Warehouse, Data Lakes, and Analytics & Reporting on cloud-based and on-prem platforms. The ideal candidate will have deep technical expertise coupled with functional experience with the platforms assigned. Specifically, this role will work with technology partners, and business stakeholders for a group of application technologies.

Solution Support

• Act as the technology subject matter expert, partnering with technology stakeholders and clients to both address issues and recommend/implement enhancements
• Investigate and resolve production related issues in a timely manner from end user (UI) to persistence layer
• Identify and mitigate risks to the service delivery and proactively address and resolve issues before they impact service levels
• Drive the technical recovery of major system outages, interfacing with numerous stakeholders including external vendors or outsourced service delivery teams
• Develop and maintain technical documentation to help ensure that support can be efficiently performed and the impact of future requests can be assessed
• Monitor service performance and recommend areas of focus for continuous improvement initiatives, including application performance management
• Participate in on-call schedule or rotations (where applicable)

Vendor Management

• Oversee vendor/partners in the timely resolution of incidents/problems/requests, ensuring service level and quality targets are met.
• Gather requirements for minor enhancements and oversee the resultant product from the vendors
• Implement continuous improvement on existing technical solutions
• Drive the adoption of agile development methodologies, focusing on improving the velocity and quality of delivered work products through DevOps practices and automated testing
• Partner with the application security team on the implementation of "security by design," ensuring that all solutions meet security standards
• Work collaboratively with other teams (QA, UX, Release Project Managers) to ensure that all project deliverables are on time and high quality
• Participate in periodic problem analysis meetings and post implementation reviews to document learnings and ensure the continuous improvement of the IT services

Engineering Support

• Design and implement technology solutions in partnership with Solution Architects, Product & Engineering Managers in support of business objectives
• Be a champion for operational excellence by ensuring technology delivery and support functions are efficient, easy to execute, simple to consume and effectively measured
• Ensure application solutions meet business expectations through capacity, performance and availability management.
• Coordinate the development and on-going maintenance of Disaster Recovery plans
• Develop and maintain the technology currency roadmap
• Help define engineering support best practices and provide technical mentorship
• Oversee the respective security and vulnerability management activities
• Research third party products and solutions to provide added business value
• Recommend and initiate New Technology analysis for application initiatives
• Maintain a moderate level of technical expertise by keeping up-to-date with the latest applicable technical changes/ knowledge
• Maintain awareness of standards, guidelines, industry trends, etc.

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• Minimum of 7 years of related work experience, to include:
• 5+ years of experience participating in the full range of development activities (including but not limited to: code deployment, load/performance testing, integration testing)
• Deep technical SAP, data pipeline, Snowflake expertise in the respective application platform/service
• Participation in formal change management processes
• Experience working within an agile framework.
• Business acumen, with deep expertise in the Finance, and HCM domain(s) as well as strong skills in the technology that supports the domain(s)
• Proven negotiating and consensus building abilities
• Experience with vendor management
• Experience with a variety of Software Development Lifecycle methodologies across waterfall and agile
• Exemplary communications skills

Leadership Skills

• A self-starter, who can effectively navigate a complex organizational structure, achieving results through influence and collaboration.
• Establish and manage effective working relationships in a matrix environment with other departments, groups and staff with whom work must be coordinated or interfaced. Comfortable influencing to achieve desired outcomes.
• A person that can decide and act without having the total picture and is comfortable handling risk and uncertainty.

Execution Skills

• HCM domain and data technical expertise will be essential, as delivery will be accomplished in a matrixed environment of internal and external partners, and suppliers.
• Practical knowledge and applied experience related to development principles. This is a hands-on position with regards to people and code.
• A practitioner of the Service Management principles and can effectively proceed through review boards and other SA activities.

Technical Skills

• Data Platforms
• SAP HANA, Snowflake, DB2, SAP BW
• AWS Service knowledge like S3, Lambda
• Data Warehouse/ Data Modeling concepts
• SQL & Java scripting
• Data Integrations
• Informatica IDMC/PowerCenter or any ETL tools
• Data Pipeline Concepts - ingestion/transformation
• Information protection/Encryption
• SAP SLT
• Application Ecosystems
• SAP S4
• SAP S4 Datasources
• BI Tools like SAP Business Object, SAP Analysis for Office, Tableau

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