Principal Data Engineer

Job ID 10099403 Location Santa Monica, California, United States Business Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology Date posted Nov. 05, 2024

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"There are so many opportunities to grow and learn within Disney! There is never a dull moment at work."

Diana, Principal Counsel

Job Summary:

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

The Product & Data Engineering team is responsible for end to end development for Disney’s world-class consumer-facing products, including streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and digital products & experiences across ESPN, Marvel, Disney Studios, NatGeo, and ABC News. The team drives innovation at scale for millions of consumers around the world across Apple, Android, Smart TVs, game consoles, and the web, with our platforms powering core experiences like personalization, search, messaging and data.

This role involves building and maintaining our Audience Manager Platform (AMP), a centralized Disney audience data platform that captures & processes all Disney consumers cross channel behavior and delivers varying summarizations in a timely manner to multiple endpoints to support all business needs. At its core, it is a product that provides a comprehensive source of truth for customer data. It is built around customer profiles and is able to provide insights from across the business so stakeholders can quickly act on the data through activation pipelines

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance data platforms. To be successful in this role, you need effective communication and collaboration skills, a passion for learning and trying new things, and a strong foundational understanding of programming and computer science.

As a member of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software.

Responsibilities:

Work with a distributed team of engineers across multiple products building software collaboratively.
Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects
Collaborate with business partners to understand and refine requirements
Eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel
Ramp up quickly on existing software to deliver incremental, integrated solutions in a complex environment
Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting
Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions
Participate in the code review process by assessing pull requests
Support systems and services during production incidents as part of the on-call rotation
Author and recommend technical proposals and root cause analyses
Provide mentoring and advice for other specialists
Establish engineering practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence
Represent the DEET technical community at presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

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 10 years of related big data engineering experience modeling and developing large data pipelines and platforms
Hands-on experience with distributed systems such as Spark, Hadoop (HDFS, Hive, Presto, PySpark) to query and process data
Expert in Python and SQL skills processing big datasets
A strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.)
Experience with at least one major MPP or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query, Databricks)
Expert in Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices
You are a problem solver with strong attention to detail and excellent analytical and communication skills
In-depth experience with Cloud technologies like AWS (S3, ECS, EMR, EC2, Lambda, etc.)
Solid experience with data integration toolsets (i.e Airflow), CI/CD
Experience using source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.

Preferred Qualifications

Proficient with Scrum and Agile methodologies
Experience directly managing and mentoring a team.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $164,500 to $220,600 per year and in New York, NY and Seattle, WA is $172,300 to $231,100 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 Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

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.

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 Disney Streaming Technology LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology.

Disney Streaming 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.

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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, email Candidate.Accommodations@Disney.com with your request. This email address is not for general employment inquiries or correspondence. 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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Explore this Location Santa Monica, CA

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