Lead Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Glendale, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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. As part of ad platform engineering, the programmatic teams build and maintain Disney’s programmatic advertising suite of products and services that comprise Disney's Real-time Ad Exchange (DRAX). DRAX is an award-winning, proprietary SSP that enables the configuration of programmatic deals and integrates programmatic demand from multiple third-party sources into the Disney ad server in real time. As a Lead Software Engineer, you will apply your deep technical knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, loosely coupled, encapsulated, and testable software and systems.

Requirements

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems
• Demonstrated project ownership
• Guidance and mentorship on system and API design, as well as implementation best practices such as microservice encapsulation and loose coupling
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast-paced environment.
• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism
• A deep understanding of Java and the Software Development Lifecycle.
• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong foundation in computer science principles, including data structures and algorithms.
• Advanced proficiency with Java, including but not limited to understanding memory management, multi-threading, profiling, thread pools, connection pools, and HTTP protocols.
• Demonstrable analytical / problem-solving skills.
• Great communication, collaboration skills, and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with SpringBoot and related Spring projects.
• Experience with Non-relational database technologies like DynamoDB.
• Experience with Caching datastores such as Redis, ValKey, or MemCache.
• Experience with Data Streaming Mechanisms such as Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis.
• Experience with Cloud platforms such as AWS.
• Experience with Modern DevOps tools such as Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with Microservice architecture.

Nice To Haves

• Domain knowledge in the Ad Tech industry.
• Domain knowledge in programmatic advertising

Responsibilities

• Holistic understanding of the team’s domain and serving as a point of contact for stakeholders
• Leading by example, supporting their peers, and striving to improve code and design towards more scalable, clean, and decoupled implementations
• Facilitate discussions and drive resolution, making sure outcomes are clear and well-communicated
• Designing, implementing, and testing solutions to various engineering problems in a high-throughput, low-latency microservices environment
• Understanding and use of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy
• Reading and understanding product user stories, translating them into actionable tasks, and leading the team through their execution
• Improve system observability by implementing comprehensive metrics, monitoring, and alerting solutions.
• Available for On-Call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees