Senior Software Engineer - Ad Traffic Engineering

Santa Monica, CA, United States

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at the vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

Within DE&E Technology, the Ad Platforms team is responsible for creating and scaling innovative global advertising solutions by building mission-critical tools and workflows to support addressable & linear ad sales, traffic, marketing and parts of broadcast operations.  Being part of the DE&E Technology team is a once-in-a-career opportunity to be a part of what’s next.

Job Summary

This role is a part of the Software Engineering team within the DE&E Ad Platforms organization. We strive to be a diverse team, passionate about great technology applied creatively to solve complex business problems.  We are a motivated team committed to lifelong learning and improving, both in and out of the office. We strive to be flexible and adaptable to change both in how we execute projects and in the technologies we use to deliver our solutions. We care about the details because every pixel, every line of code, and every user interaction with our products determines whether we are delivering on our commitment to producing the very best products possible.  You’ll be joining a talented team that works interdependently toward aggressive goals to deliver technically sound solutions.  We work to ensure that we share both accountability and credit as a team. We often include our users as part of our team and we work to connect with them on a human level, understanding their world, so we can deliver software that they love to use.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will use your deep Java, cloud-native services, messaging, and data persistence skills to implement solutions that deliver resilient, scalable, innovative, and impactful features to our world-wide application portfolio. You will be an important part of a motivated team, where we’ll be looking for you to collaborate with and drive the team to excellence – from application architecture to code quality and operational fitness; ensuring that we are building the right thing for our users. We want someone who has grown through the modern web and cloud-native software development ranks, possessing solid experience in designing and implementing highly scalable, secure, performant, and usable web applications using Java/Java EE and AWS. The ideal candidate would possess expertise in server-side development stack (Java, Spring, RESTful web services), orchestration and containerization platforms (Docker and Kubernetes), messaging/data-persistence/data-streaming platforms (MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra, Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka), and cloud-native architecture patterns.

While The Walt Disney Company is a large company, ideally, we’d like if you have some previous experience in a U.S. startup environment and be comfortable performing multiple roles. We strive to get things done quickly, with high quality, and we are committed to the agile methodology. Our work is guided by lean principles (looking at value and looking for waste; not doing anything ‘for the sake of doing it’).

We’re looking for a passionate and impactful technical leader who wants to come here to do their very best work and make their mark, adding their chapter to the long and storied history of The Walt Disney Company; someone who holds themselves and their teammates accountable in a professional, collaborative manner, and who can provide a fresh perspective and innovative insight to our initiatives.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with leads and influence software architectures which are robust, fault-tolerant, and cloud- native

Utilize extensive AWS managed service solution experience to engineer first class cloud-native solutions

Reason logically and creatively, identifying problems, drawing valid conclusions from the data available, and develop effective solutions while applying creative thinking in the design and implementation of high performing web applications

Collaborate with fellow senior and lead engineers to promote good architecture principles, standards, and alignment, and ensure the needs of our users are meet in the best way possible

Lead code reviews and provide leadership and direction to junior engineers

Deliver multiple projects utilizing Agile methodologies

Take a high ownership, self-sufficient, hands-on position on the team to lead and drive quality, maintain application stability

Write complex programs, analyze code changes and suggest improvements

Contribute valuable, clean code on a daily basis that adds new features and capabilities

Help to streamline, automate, and improve delivery pipelines

Create references and reference implementations, as well as run proof-of-concept projects when needed

Provide technical mentorship to the team

Investigate and resolve any production issues across the entire tech stack, and work to prevent them

Work collaboratively with other service teams

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

Minimum of 5 years of experience in web application development or software engineering in a large enterprise environment using Java, including familiarity with modern frameworks and platforms (e.g., Spring, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka)

Minimum of 3 years of experience in microservice architecture, including experience with containerized hosting (Docker, Kubernetes) and data streaming/messaging platforms (Kafka)

Be able to demonstrate significant experience working with relational databases, SQL and newer NoSQL data stores as well as event streaming platforms

Strong hands-on experience with GIT-based source controls tools and automation software (CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, etc.)

Have a strong knowledge of open source technology

Possess good communication skills and enjoy mentoring and helping others to succeed as a team

Care about your craft and have a continuous improvement mindset

Preferred Qualifications

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

Previous work experience in advertising platforms

Experience working with vendor teams to deliver high quality results

Knowledge of performance testing and application profiling (Gatling, JProfiler)

Strong curiosity about how Disney delivers the Magic and a desire to be a part of it

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in California is $136,038 to $199,870 per year and in Seattle, Washington is $142,516 to $191,180 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.