Sr Data Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Santa Monica, CA

2d • 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. The Acquisition Marketing Engineering team owns the ingestion, modeling, and activation of acquisition and lifecycle marketing data across multiple platforms. We build and maintain large scale data pipelines that ingest vendor data (paid media, mobile attribution, search, social, display, email, and more), land it in cloud storage, and transform it into analytics-ready datasets powering acquisition reporting tools, dashboards, and executive insights. You will be a senior member of the engineering team driving multiple transformations end‑to‑end.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a Data Engineer or similar role.
• Strong proficiency in SQL (analytical SQL, complex joins, window functions).
• Hands-on experience with PySpark and/or Spark SQL in production.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, ETL/ELT design patterns, and distributed data processing.
• Experience building pipelines in Databricks, including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, data governance, and Lakehouse patterns.
• Strong experience in AWS (S3, IAM, EC2, Glue, Lambda, or related services).
• Proficiency with Airflow or similar orchestration tools.
• Experience building robust ingestion pipelines and working with semi‑structured formats (JSON, Parquet, CSV).
• Experience with Git/GitHub, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work with cross‑functional partners.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems or related field

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in computer science, Information Systems or related field a plus
• Experience with marketing or customer acquisition data (Meta, Google Ads, Google CM360, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, Branch, AppsFlyer, Salesforce, etc.).
• Familiarity with data observability, SLA monitoring, incident workflows, or reliability engineering concepts.
• Exposure to data quality frameworks (Great Expectations, Deequ, Monte Carlo, or custom frameworks).

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable ETL/ELT pipelines for acquisition reporting using Databricks, PySpark, SQL, and Unity Catalog.
• Lead the modernization effort to migrate existing Snowflake‑based SQL scripts and transformations into Databricks UC with best practices in governance and structured access.
• Design robust ingestion frameworks for marketing vendor data.
• Implement data quality checks, monitoring, and automated remediation using Databricks, Snowflake, Airflow, and internal frameworks.
• Develop metadata-driven, parameterized pipeline components to accelerate onboarding of new vendors and datasets.
• Partner with the Data Reliability Engineering team to integrate SLA-based incident detection, logging, alerting, and auto-recovery workflows.
• Collaborate with analytics and marketing stakeholders to understand reporting needs and ensure reliable dashboard data.
• Improve pipeline performance, reliability, logging, and observability.
• Contribute to engineering best practices, code reviews, technical design docs, and framework enhancements.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to team-wide architectural decisions.

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