Lead Software Engineer

Technical Lead Software Engineer

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.

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is looking for a Technical Lead Software Engineer to join the Playback Services team within the Media Engineering organization. The Playback Services team's mission is to build highly available, high throughput services that are essential to delivering high quality content to our subscribers. The team is responsible for the backend of media playback, facilitating media selection, device customization, and antipiracy technologies.

As a Tech Lead on the PlayIO team, you'll be directly influencing the performance, reliability, and scalability of our core applications. You'll work closely with a talented team of software engineers, acting as a technical anchor and mentor. Your days will involve guiding critical architectural decisions, diving deep into complex code reviews, and troubleshooting production issues to ensure seamless operation. You'll also play a pivotal role in shaping our technical roadmap, championing best practices in areas like system resilience, and developer efficiency.

You'll make a significant impact on the organization by contributing to the development of new features, and ensuring our services remain highly available for our users. By optimizing system performance, and nurturing a culture of excellence within your team, you'll directly contribute to an enhanced user experience on our streaming applications. This role is crucial for our continued growth, empowering us to confidently scale our offerings, and innovate rapidly.

Responsibilities

• Work with a team of engineers building software in a collaborative development process
• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting
• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions
• Participate in the code review process by providing feedback on pull requests
• Participate in the on-call rotation, supporting systems and services during production incidents
• Author and provide feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses
• Provide mentoring and advice for other engineers
• Establish engineering best practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence
• Contribute to the DSS technical community through presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years related experience designing backend architectures and delivering backend applications in a production environment
• Experience building RESTful Services in Scala or Java
• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, async/await) and thread + concurrency
• Understanding of source control concepts and exposure to Git
• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins, Spinnaker, and Docker
• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and common design patterns.
• Demonstrated knowledge in building and operating large-scale high availability backend services
• Knowledge of caching technologies
• Proficiency in Cloud Platforms and DevOps Practices
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Self-learner, independent, excellent problem-solving skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated knowledge in building and operating large-scale high availability backend services in a JVM language
• Functional Programming in Scala
• Experience building RESTful Services in Scala
• Expertise in Performance Optimization and Scalability
• Demonstrated ability to analyze complex technical challenges, propose well-reasoned solutions, and articulate design choices clearly
• Experience with: AWS (EKS, S3, ElastiCache, Kinesis, OpenSearch), Scala, Java, Python, Terraform. Experience with observability tooling (ex. DataDog)