Lead Software Engineer

Job ID 10115921 Location Orlando, Florida, United States / Burbank, California, United States / Lake Buena Vista, Florida, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States / Glendale, California, United States Business Disney Experiences Date posted Apr. 21, 2025 This role is considered remote, which means the employee will work remotely on an ongoing basis and will not have an assigned workspace at a Company designated location.

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Job Summary:

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) 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.

Job Summary:

Are you passionate about working on large-scale, high-performance software systems with a strong focus on service reliability? Join our team as a Lead Software Engineer dedicated to ensuring the availability, scalability, and resilience of our cloud-based services. In this role, you’ll leverage your expertise in service reliability and cloud platforms to create scalable solutions that support the entire Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products segment. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, offering technical expertise to develop products and tooling, while ensuring the smooth delivery of features and capabilities for the Data Platform and Products team, ultimately enhancing the magic of our guests' experiences.

Responsibilities:

Service Reliability: Establish key service-level indicators (SLIs) and continuously monitor them to ensure system reliability, availability, and performance. Proactively develop alerts and automated responses to prevent service degradation or outages.
Lead Cross-Functional Projects: Drive complex projects across multiple teams and disciplines, ensuring high availability, resilience, and minimal downtime of services.
Root Cause Analysis & Incident Response: Conduct deep analysis of system issues, identify root causes, and define actionable strategies for remediation. Lead post-mortem analysis and continuous improvement efforts.
Infrastructure & System Optimization: Focus on the high availability, scalability, and performance of services in production environments, ensuring they meet business and customer needs.
Capacity Planning & Right-Sizing: Lead efforts to ensure that services are properly scaled for current and future workloads. Engage in capacity planning to optimize resource utilization.
Documentation & Runbooks: Maintain detailed documentation and create robust runbooks for incident management and troubleshooting, ensuring smooth responses to service disruptions.
Cloud Infrastructure & IaC: Utilize tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to manage and automate infrastructure as code (IaC) in a cloud-native environment.
Service Monitoring & Observability: Oversee observability and monitoring across the platform (AWS, serverless, containers, Snowflake, etc.), ensuring actionable insights are available for operational teams.
Collaboration with Development Teams: Work closely with developers to ensure that applications are designed for service reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
GitOps-Driven Environment: Drive infrastructure changes and service deployment using GitOps practices to ensure consistency and traceability in deployments.
Code Quality: Write clean, performant, and well-documented application code with a focus on reliability and service availability.
Automation & Tooling: Build and maintain automated deployment pipelines and tooling for monitoring and platform testing.
Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers and assist in technical decision-making and code reviews.

Qualifications:

Experience: 7+ years of experience in software development, with at least 3 years focused on service reliability, data management, and distributed systems.
Technical Expertise: Expert-level coding skills in Python, with a deep understanding of performance and resource optimization, including considerations of space and time complexity.
Cloud Infrastructure: Strong experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS Fargate, S3, VPC, Kinesis, EventBridge, and related components.
Serverless & Containers: Proven experience in working with serverless (AWS Lambda) and containerized environments (Docker, ECS, EKS).
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with IaC tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to automate infrastructure management.
CI/CD & DevOps: Extensive experience in CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and general DevOps practices for continuous integration and deployment.
Observability: Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools such as DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, or similar suites.
Agile & DevOps: Strong proponent of Agile methodologies and application of DevOps principles for continuous improvement.

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Certifications in AWS, Snowflake, or relevant service reliability tools.
In-depth experience with observability suites and Application Performance Management (APM) tooling such as DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, etc.

#DISNEYTECH

#LI-AF2

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA is $152,200.00 - $204,100.00 per year and in Seattle, WA is $159,500.00 - $213,900.00 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.

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About Disney Experiences:

Disney Experiences brings the magic of Disney stories and franchises to life through theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, unique vacation experiences, products and more around the world. Disney shines in the travel industry with six resort destinations in the United States, Europe and Asia; a top-rated cruise line; a popular vacation ownership program; and an award-winning guided family adventure business. Plus, Disney's global consumer products operations include the world's leading licensing business; the world's largest children's publishing brands; one of the world's largest licensors of games across all platforms; and Disney store locations around the world and on the web.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

This position is with Walt Disney Attractions Technology LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Experiences.

Walt Disney Attractions Technology LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION FOR EMPLOYMENT APPLICATIONS

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

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Hiring Process

Where Does Your Story Begin?

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Explore this Location Orlando, FL

Whether you’re a theme park enthusiast, bird watcher, foodie, water sports fanatic, sun worshipper, arts patron, serious shopper or anything in between,the possibilities are endless in Orlando. And wonder is always within reach.