Lead Data Platform Engineer

Lead Data Platform Engineer

At Disney, we're storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company 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.

The Data Solutions & Products group is part of Enterprise Technology. We are responsible for designing and developing enterprise solutions and managing a diverse portfolio of products and tools related to Data, Analytics and Automation used by business teams across The Walt Disney Company.

The Lead Data Platform Engineer position is one of the key technical leadership roles on the team. You will have the opportunity to be the Lead Engineer for major development projects related to data & analytics solutions and platforms. The first project this role will be responsible as the Lead Engineer for leading is the implementation of a Finance Data Layer—a data lakehouse that provides data to Finance systems and applications including an EPM system, BI reporting & analytics, and AI/ML applications.

You will be working in a challenging, fast-paced, highly collaborative and rewarding environment, as a member of product and project teams that work closely with each other and with our business partners to deliver innovative and industry-leading business solutions.

What You'll Do:

• Leading teams of developers (both Disney Cast Members and external vendors) in major software/data development projects.
• Designing and developing highly scalable, distributed enterprise data platform solutions.
• Design, develop and implement scalable distributed enterprise data platform solutions, focusing on multi-cluster warehousing, data sharing, and optimized storage.
• Write code that establishes and enhances frameworks and design proof of concepts, and review code for correctness, and its impact on software architecture.
• Lead the development of high-performance ETL/ELT pipelines using tools like dbt, Python, Airflow and more to integrate diverse data sources.
• Provide mentorship and direction to more junior software engineers on the team; serve as an advanced resources for other engineers on the team.
• Being the ongoing technical lead for data platform products (post-implementation)—leading engineering support for the production platform, leading ongoing enhancement projects, guiding technical product roadmap
• Partner with Data Science, Analytics, and Product teams to ensure the platform meets evolving business requirements.
• Establish standards for data modeling (Vault, Star Schema), security (RBAC), and data quality frameworks.
• Excellent communication skills, ability to communicate well to both technical and business audiences
• Strong collaboration skills

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• 7+ years of professional programming and design experience in Scala, Java, Python etc.; demonstrated experience designing and developing enterprise data solutions and platforms
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering initiatives on major software and data development projects
• Experience with medallion-based data Lakehouse architectures
• Experience with high-scale cloud data platforms and with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Expert knowledge of data integration, dimensional modeling and data warehousing techniques.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines for data
• Proficiency in Java, SQL
• Experience with Snowflake

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with enterprise data domains is preferred (especially Finance and HR data)
• Experience with AI/ML
• Experience with SAP Systems (S4, BW, HANA, BDC)
• Experience with EPM Systems (e.g. Oracle EPM)
• Experience with Data Governance
• Experience with Master Data Management
• Experience with BI tools

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
• Master's Degree a Plus