Lead Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer

"We Power the Magic!" That's our motto at Disney Experiences Technology (DXT). Our team creates world-class immersive digital experiences for the Company's premier vacation brands, including Disney's Parks & Resorts. We are responsible for the end-to-end digital and physical Guest experience for all technology and digital-led initiatives across Food & Beverage, and Merchandise lines of business.

This role sits within the Retail & Restaurant Technology organization and supports the Point of Sale (POS) platform — the system that powers every merchandise and dining transaction across our parks and resorts. Our platform is a large-scale, distributed, event-driven system. We work with a polyglot stack (PHP, Go, Python, Java) that we are actively modernizing, and we need engineers who embrace the platform as it is while helping shape what it becomes. The main client of our services is the POS terminal itself — an Android-based hardware device used by thousands of Cast Members every day — so reliability, performance, and thoughtful API design directly impact the Guest and Cast experience.

The Lead Software Engineer will report to the Manager, Software Engineering.

What You Will Do

• Lead and personally build scalable, well-documented backend services and APIs across our polyglot platform — PHP and Go microservices today, with a growing Java/Spring footprint — from technical specification through production delivery.
• Set architectural direction for the POS platform: translate complex functional, technical, and business requirements into solution and system designs, produce architecture diagrams and proof-of-concepts, evaluate technology choices, and ensure new solutions integrate cleanly with surrounding Disney systems.
• Drive the modernization roadmap, playing a leading technical role in the migration of existing PHP and Go microservices into Java/Spring applications — defining migration patterns, sequencing, coexistence strategies, and quality gates so we modernize without disrupting daily park operations.
• Own the full software development life cycle for your team's deliverables: planning, estimation, design reviews, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, production support, and post-incident root-cause analysis.
• Lead and mentor a team of backend Software Engineers — provide day-to-day technical direction, unblock engineers, review designs and code, grow junior talent, and foster a culture of engineering excellence and psychological safety.
• Assess and communicate risk: identify technical, delivery, and operational risks early; give clear direction on trade-offs; and escalate to leadership with well-formed options and recommendations when decisions exceed the team's authority.
• Design and operate event-driven and streaming integrations using Amazon Kinesis and RabbitMQ, ensuring our transaction, inventory, and reporting flows are resilient, idempotent, and observable.
• Steward our data layer, designing performant schemas and access patterns on Amazon Aurora (MySQL-compatible), guiding ORM usage, and safeguarding transactional integrity for a system where every record represents real money and a real Guest.
• Champion AI-assisted engineering, embedding tools such as Claude, Cursor, and Codex into the team's daily workflow — from design and coding to testing and troubleshooting — and shaping responsible adoption practices that raise both velocity and quality.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product owners, program management, architecture, QA, hardware/terminal teams, and vendor partners to align solutions with current and future business needs, and represent the team in tactical and strategic forums with all levels of leadership.
• Support production, participating in on-call rotations and go-lives for a platform where availability matters most during the moments our Guests are creating memories.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• 7+ years of progressive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, high-volume backend systems and services, including 2+ years leading engineers or serving as technical lead across the full software development life cycle.
• Strong hands-on expertise in PHP (modern PHP 8+; experience with a major framework such as Laravel or Symfony) and Go (idiomatic Go for microservices; familiarity with common toolkits such as Gin, Echo, or gRPC-Go).
• Working proficiency in Java and Spring / Spring Boot, with the ability to lead the design and buildout of new Java services as part of our microservices migration.
• Deep understanding of RDBMS fundamentals — schema design, indexing, query optimization, transactions, isolation levels — with hands-on experience on Amazon Aurora and/or MySQL, and practical experience with ORMs (e.g., Hibernate/JPA) including knowing when not to use them.
• Production experience with streaming and eventing architectures: Amazon Kinesis (or Kafka) for streams and RabbitMQ (or similar broker) for messaging — including delivery guarantees, ordering, dead-lettering, replay, and backpressure.
• Expertise designing REST APIs and service contracts, plus experience with binary serialization formats such as Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) and gRPC-style service communication.
• Experience deploying and operating containerized workloads on Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and working knowledge of the broader AWS ecosystem; comfortable with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code concepts.
• Proven strength in system design and architecture: distributed systems patterns (event-driven architecture, CQRS, saga/compensation, circuit breakers, caching strategies), scalability and fault-tolerance design, and documenting architecture for varied audiences.
• Hands-on experience using AI-powered engineering tools (Claude, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate design, development, testing, and debugging.
• Experience monitoring and troubleshooting distributed production systems with observability tooling (e.g., Splunk, Grafana, CloudWatch), including leading root-cause analysis for complex incidents.
• Solid computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and object-oriented and functional design principles; disciplined engineering practices including automated testing, TDD, and code review.

Staff-Level Engineering Craft

• Ability to operate autonomously and lead complex, multi-team initiatives end to end — setting direction, decomposing ambiguity into executable plans, and driving them to done.
• Sound technical judgment: pragmatic about trade-offs between speed, quality, and cost; knows when to refactor, when to rewrite, and when to leave working software alone.
• A track record of raising the engineering bar around them — through reusable patterns, better tooling, clearer documentation, and standards that outlive any single project.
• Comfort working in inherited, vendor-built codebases: the humility to learn a system before judging it, and the skill to improve it incrementally and safely. Our stack was not chosen by us — we need someone who adapts to what exists while steering it toward where Disney is going.

Leadership Skills

• Clear communicator — able to explain deep technical topics to engineers, product partners, and executives alike, and to write designs and decisions down so they scale beyond a conversation.
• Mentor and multiplier — genuinely invested in growing engineers; gives direct, kind, actionable feedback and creates room for others to lead.
• Calm under pressure — makes sound decisions during incidents and tight deadlines, keeping the team focused rather than frantic.
• Ownership mindset — accountable for outcomes, not just output; follows problems through to resolution across team boundaries.
• Skilled at influence without authority — builds alignment across architecture, product, operations, and vendor partners; disagrees constructively and commits fully.
• Risk-aware and transparent — surfaces bad news early, frames escalations with options and a recommendation, and never lets leadership be surprised.
• Adaptable and curious — thrives in a fast-changing, sometimes ambiguous environment, and treats an unfamiliar tech stack as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.
• Collaborative and inclusive — works effectively with distributed/remote teams and fosters an environment where every engineer's voice is heard.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Point of Sale, payments, retail, or restaurant technology, including operational realities of transaction-critical systems.
• Experience building for or integrating with Android-based clients or embedded/terminal hardware, and designing APIs that serve intermittently connected devices gracefully.
• Working knowledge of Python for scripting, tooling, or services.
• Experience with React or a modern front-end framework, enough to partner effectively with web engineers on end-to-end features.
• Hands-on experience leading a platform migration or re-platforming effort (e.g., PHP/Go to Java, monolith to microservices, or vendor-to-in-house transition).
• Experience managing external vendor relationships and deliverables, including technical assessment of vendor work quality.
• Familiarity with SRE practices: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, chaos/resili