Staff Data Engineer

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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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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:

The Ads Data team, part of Disney's Ad Platforms organization, is on a mission to transform the advertising landscape across TV and streaming video through the power of data and AI. We design and build innovative solutions that measure and optimize the entire advertising lifecycle — from planning and activation to measurement and insights.

At the heart of our work is a highly collaborative, cross-functional team that delivers end-to-end solutions across a wide spectrum of technologies, including machine learning, big data, microservices, and data visualization.

We are seeking a Senior Staff Product Development Engineer to help drive the next phase of our platform’s evolution. In this role, you will lead a team of talented backend and big data engineers focused on building scalable, cloud-native data infrastructure that underpins Disney’s addressable ad capabilities. This includes operational data pipelines, audience solutions, and full-funnel measurement systems.

As a Staff Data Engineer, you will be responsible for setting the technical direction, delivering mission-critical systems, and mentoring engineers to achieve high standards of excellence. You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, researchers, and data scientists to deliver high-impact solutions that enable data-driven advertising strategies across Disney’s portfolio of brands.

This role is ideal for someone who combines strong technical expertise with a passion for leadership, system design, and delivering real business impact through data platforms. If you thrive in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment and are excited about building the foundation for the future of advertising, we’d love to hear from you.

Responsibilities:

• Build and lead a high-performing team of big data and backend engineers, focusing on hiring, mentoring, and fostering professional and technical growth.

• Architect, design, and lead the development of scalable, cloud-native data platforms for real-time and batch processing. Drive initiatives to improve performance, availability, and resilience of systems.

• Own and drive end-to-end delivery of high-impact data platform features and services. Lead execution across multiple initiatives, ensuring alignment with business goals and technical strategy.

• Provide strong architectural direction and ensure thoughtful design decisions that consider scalability, performance, maintainability, and cost efficiency.

• Champion engineering excellence through adoption of best practices including clean code, design patterns, CI/CD, code reviews, observability, and automated testing.

• Drive incident prevention and response processes. Lead root cause analyses, postmortems, and implementation of long-term fixes to systemic issues.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, program managers, SDETs, and researchers to define requirements, scope technical solutions, and deliver robust systems.

• Stay ahead of industry trends and advocate for the adoption of emerging technologies, tools, and processes that can improve engineering velocity and platform capabilities.

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of professional programming and design experience in Scala, Java, Python etc.

• 5+ years of big data development experience with technical stacks like Spark, Flink, Singlestore, Kafka and AWS big data technologies

• Strong knowledge of system / application design and architecture

• Experience of building industry level high available and scalable service

• Experience with processing large amount of data at petabyte level

• Architect and optimize solutions on AWS, including S3, EMR, Lambda, Glue, and other cloud-native services

• Drive adoption of Databricks for collaborative development, job scheduling, and performance tuning

• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance

• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, data quality issues, and reliability gaps in the data ecosystem

• Passionate about technologies, and openness to interdisciplinary work

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience managing or mentoring a team of data engineers

• Demonstrated ability with cloud infrastructure technologies, including Databricks, Terraform, K8S, Spinnaker, IAM, ALB, and etc.

• Experience with Snowflake, Kinesis, lambda etc.

• Experience in MicroService framework like Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, FastAPI, NestJS etc.

• Experience with: Spark, Flink (or SparkStreaming), Airflow, Databricks, Scala (or Java), Python, AWS big data technologies, Agile project management

Required Education: Bachelor or above in computer science or or a related quantitative field; or equivalent practical experience demonstrating advanced technical expertise

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