Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

Do you want to lead the development of tools that data engineers and business users rely on every day to build, ship, and govern data products at Disney Experiences? Helix is our enterprise data platform, powering everything from personalization to operational reporting across the business. Helix is scaling fast, and the tools engineers use to build on it need to keep pace. Own the data engineering frameworks and capabilities for Orbit and Book of Work, defining how data sources and data products are configured, built, deployed, observed, and operated on Helix. You'll set the technical design, write and review code, and partner with Data Architecture on key architectural decisions. This is a hands-on lead role. You're accountable for the code that gets built, its quality, and what ultimately gets deployed. This role sits in the Data Products & Platforms organization in Disney Experiences Technology and reports to the Director of Platform Strategy & Governance.

What You'll Do:

• Own the build and integration of Orbit and Book of Work, including the reusable pipeline frameworks and engineering capabilities that take data sources and products from definition through build, deployment, and ongoing operation on Helix.
• Design automation and AI capabilities that translate intent into data engineering action, reducing the manual steps between an identified need and a production-ready data source or product.
• Design how application data, metadata, engineering artifacts, and workflow state move and persist across the platform to enable reliable data pipelines, data product development, automation, and end-to-end engineering workflows.
• Write and review production-quality code for reusable data engineering frameworks and platform capabilities, including pipeline orchestration, data processing, transformation, services, APIs, metadata, and platform integrations.
• Set the design standards and QA processes for both tools, ensuring data remains compatible, operable, and reliable across every connection, transmission, and storage system it touches.
• Analyze how internal and external needs are evolving and recommend changes to systems and storage to keep pace.
• Help scope, estimate, and plan large, complex projects, including budget.
• Track emerging technologies and bring back concrete, informed recommendations.
• Own the technical health of Orbit and Book of Work in production, including observability, incident escalation, root-cause analysis, and improvements that prevent recurring operational issues.

What You'll Need:

• 7+ years of related work experience.
• Strong data engineering skills in Python and SQL, with scripting experience for data extraction, transformation, automation, and building performant data solutions.
• Experience across relational, NoSQL, cloud, and modern data platform technologies, including environments such as Snowflake, SQL Server, Postgres, DynamoDB, Redis, and AWS services such as Lambda, Kinesis, DMS, and AppFlow.
• A strong focus on developer experience, including intuitive workflows, sensible defaults, observability, and reducing cognitive load for engineers.
• Experience using AI, ML, or automation to remove meaningful manual work from data pipeline or data product delivery workflows.
• Comfort setting technical direction and design standards for a team and defending those decisions.
• Experience working in agile environments and partnering across engineering and business teams as requirements shift.
• Familiarity with Snowflake and modern data platform tooling, such as Snowpipe Streaming and Snowsight, with the drive to keep growing into new data engineering tools and methods.

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.