Senior Product Software Engineer - Data Platform

The Walt Disney Company • Glendale, CA

3d • $141,900 - $190,300 • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking an Innovative Data Platform Automation Engineer to reduce manual effort and improve reliability across their data platform through enhanced monitoring and supporting tools. This role involves designing and building services and internal tooling to ensure the health of production data pipelines, with a focus on automating monitoring, accelerating pipeline debugging, and maintaining Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The engineer will also develop AI agents and workflows to assist in debugging complex pipelines by linking runtime signals to a knowledge base and collaborating with data quality services to identify, explain, and triage data issues more rapidly. The team is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products, driving advertising performance, innovation, and value across all media platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred), or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years in data platform engineering, or data operations (DataOps/SRE-style), with demonstrable experience shipping AI-assisted automation and internal tool expertise.
• Strong Python skills: application/library development, testing (unit/integration), packaging and distribution, and production-minded practices (logging, config, error handling, observability hooks as appropriate).
• APIs and integration experience: experience building HTTP/gRPC services, internal SDKs/CLIs, or platform components consumed by multiple teams.
• LLM engineering: hands-on use of LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) and orchestration with frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph (or equivalent), including prompt/tool design, evaluation, and safe production patterns (permissions, guardrails, cost/latency controls).
• Agentic systems in practice: shipped reusable agents, workflows, or libraries that improved debugging, triage, or automation—and were adopted beyond a single team.
• Cross-functional execution: strong communication and stakeholder management across infrastructure, data engineering, security, and product; comfortable translating ambiguous operational pain into measurable platform outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Strong Software Engineering experience to build tools and services with Python or GoLang.
• Understanding of Data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake and ETL Tools such as Spark.
• Previous experience in a developer enablement role (platform engineering, frameworks, SDKs) where reusable components accelerated adoption across large organizations.

Responsibilities

• Automate recurring operational work by converting runbooks and ad-hoc fixes into version-controlled automation (Python/Go CLIs, scheduled jobs, CI-driven checks, or lightweight services) with traceable execution.
• Partner with data engineers to model DAG dependencies, SLAs/SLO touchpoints, and orchestration.
• Prioritize tooling that accelerates incident response, including dependency/lineage views, data freshness monitors, and schema/drift checks.
• Implement LLM-assisted triage services that fuse metrics, logs/traces, orchestrator task metadata, data quality rules, and incident history with dependency-aware evaluations to propose ranked hypotheses and verification steps (e.g., partition gaps, late upstream, contention, bad deploy, contract mismatch).
• Integrate via webhooks/APIs into on-call workflows (PagerDuty/Slack/Jira) with guardrails.

Benefits

• Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.
• Bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior