Manager, Software Engineering - BI & Analytics

Manager, Software Engineering – BI & Analytics

Technology is at the heart of Disney's past, present, and future. 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.

Here are a few reasons why we think you'd love working here:

• Building the future of Disney's media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney's technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company's brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney's industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney's sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

Job Summary:

We are seeking a Manager, Software Engineering, focused on BI & Analytics to lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary team in building and maintaining the data pipelines, AI-powered data solutions, and custom analytics UIs and dashboards that are foundational to Disney's Ad Platforms. In this role, you'll manage both frontend and backend software & data engineering, ensuring that business and end-user needs are met with reliability, scalability, and outstanding UI/UX design. The ideal candidate will be both a technical leader and a people manager with deep expertise in software, data engineering and platform strategy.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Instill a culture grounded in engineering best practices such as code quality, documentation, automation, and continuous improvement
• Ensure engineering principles are consistently applied across projects and teams
• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of high-performing software and data engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative culture
• Coordinate with Product Management to align engineering roadmaps with product initiatives and timelines
• Partner with Program Managers to drive planning, prioritization, and delivery of cross-functional efforts
• Collaborate with QA leadership to build data quality processes and end-to-end validation
• Lead and grow a high-performing team of software and data engineers working on mission-critical data products
• Set engineering roadmaps, delivery timelines, and platform-level initiatives
• Drive adoption of best-in-class tools and practices for data governance, lineage, observability, and cost optimization
• Provide technical guidance and career development for the team
• Collaborate with senior leadership to define data strategy and long-term architecture vision
• Manage capacity planning, resource allocation, and performance reviews
• Lead vendor/tool evaluations and oversee key integration efforts
• Partner with BI and analytics leads to ensure consistent, reliable data is delivered across the enterprise
• Spearhead the implementation of custom dashboards and analytics UIs, leveraging modern web frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, etc.), advanced data visualization, and design system best practices.
• Rapidly prototype UI components tailored to stakeholder/business requirements, ensuring high standards for usability, accessibility, and visual polish.
• Drive the integration of AI/ML solutions into both backend pipelines and analytics products; champion the use of AI-powered software development processes and robust, end-to-end SDLC practices.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Required Qualifications

• Languages: Scala, Python, SQL, JavaScript
• Data Processing: Apache Spark, Flink, Airflow
• Platforms & Tools: Databricks, Hive, Presto, Snowflake
• Cloud: AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Lambda)
• Minimum of 8 years of relevant software engineering, data engineering or data science – preferably with a digital media or digital advertising company
• Experience delivering products in an agile software development environment including sprint work in Jira
• Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to collaborate and partner across multiple teams and organizations
• Strong SQL experience including writing/optimizing complex queries against distributed data stores such as Aurora, Hadoop, Hive, Oracle, and Snowflake
• Experience with data pipeline and workflow management tools: Apache NiFi or Apache Airflow
• Expert level knowledge in at least one programming language such as Python, R, Scala, Java.
• Demonstrated experience working with business intelligence tools such as MicroStrategy, Tableau, Business Objects, Looker, etc.
• Strong experience building and deploying dashboards and UIs with frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue.
• Demonstrated ability to quickly prototype and implement custom UI components to meet evolving business/stakeholder specs.
• Familiarity with AI-powered solution development and integrating machine learning into production data/analytics environments.
• Strong software development life cycle (SDLC) management experience, including source control, CI/CD, and agile workflows (Jira).
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate complex concepts to technical and unacquainted audiences
• Experience in working with large datasets (Terabytes or more)
• Strong presentation and documentation skills including experience working with Confluence, Power Point, and Lucid Chart
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills
• Enjoy working collaboratively with a talented group of people to tackle challenging business problems so we all succeed (or fail fast) as a team

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing, building and supporting Business Intelligence (BI) data platforms, dashboards, and reporting environments
• Experience in Ad Tech, particularly Linear or Addressable Advertising
• Experience with digital advertising systems and ecosystems
• Experience using data analytics to triage and troubleshoot advertising workflows
• Experience with network topologies, systems architecture overviews, and entity relationship diagrams (ERD)
• Experience with rapid prototyping and agile delivery of analytics products.

Required Education

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical fields, or equivalent experience