Lead Software Engineer

Job Description

Disney Streaming encompasses the teams leading the Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Star+ streaming services within the Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution group. We sit at the intersection between entertainment, sports, and technology and seek to connect viewers with the stories they love, while driving the streaming industry forward with consumer-first innovation.
Our core mission is to deliver global audiences the freedom to access content on their terms across any connected device, time or location. We serve consumers by bringing the world's most beloved characters, timeless stories, legendary athletes, and epic sporting events to global audiences through best-in-class direct-to-consumer video services.

Disney+ topped 100 million active subscribers just 16 months from launching and we have aspirations for many more. Ensuring all of our millions of users have the magical experience they come to expect from Disney, when watching their favourite shows is a challenge that we relish. This means scaling, and reliability is our primary focus in everything we build.
Our Teams

The teams in Manchester work in small squads that promote Agile practices. Each team and their respective squads are responsible for a collection of microservices and their infrastructure, from building to delivery and maintenance. We take great pride in owning what we build and seeing things through to the end.

Experimentation
Our high-scale in-house A/B testing platform. Deeply integrated into our platform to enable experimentation on every aspect of the product. We're building a fully bespoke platform using cutting edge technologies, capable of serving millions of concurrent requests with single digit millisecond response times. We provide our users with a fully self service experience including comprehensive in-tool curation and analysis of experiments.

We're also responsible for our platform's feature flagging capabilities, extending our experimentation platform to provide fully dynamic, user specific configuration to all clients, enabling a truly universal end to end process for test, rollout, experiment, release, rollback capabilities.

Customer Experience / QoS
Our team builds services to measure the Customer Experience for Video Playback, in real-time. This means taking high throughput streaming event data (~10TB/day) generated by our client applications, and creating a user experience to support our analysts who generate insights into the underlying quality of the streaming experience, driving improvement. It requires us to make technical tradeoffs between what we can achieve with the data we can gather, and the requirements from our internal users on a regular basis.

Token Services

We help to secure the platform using OAuth 2.0 & JWTs. Generating tokens used by our applications every time they make service requests to e.g. discover and playback content, including by third parties such as Google Assistant initiated playback. We also build internal tooling to help our teams test and debug in production.

Being a critical path multi-region service means we set the bar high for availability. We serve billions of requests per week with double digit millisecond response times. Reliability, scalability, and cryptographic agility is critical to us!

Subscription Services

Responsible for supporting new customer signup and retention flows, billing services and payment integrations. The Subscription team supports high traffic API services that provide the source of truth for all products, subscriptions and entitlements owned by our subscriber base. This data is surfaced globally to our streaming client apps as well as via real time data streams that feed other platform services and our analytics capabilities.

The team also supports subscription management functionality providing users the ability to upgrade/ downgrade their plan or cancel, for example as well as driving the subscription lifecycle including supporting monthly renewals.

What you'll do:
• Be part of an Agile team building the world's fastest growing media streaming platform.
• Strive for excellence, challenge yourself, and become part of a collaborative, inclusive and diverse team.
• Contribute to or lead a significant part of the implementation, design, testing, and deployment of services within your team.
• Leverage, learn and apply cutting edge technologies on challenging and varied business domains.
• Apply principled engineering practices including unit testing, integration testing, and continuous integration.
• Develop your technical understanding to support and build your career.
• Act as a mentor and an example to others in your team and across the organisation.
• Have the opportunity to contribute to our open source or blog communities

What we would like to see:

We're interested in candidates with strong experience in a few areas, or some experience in most areas. Each team is different and we don't expect you to know everything!
• Broad and deep technical knowledge, throughout the full stack. Deep hands-on expertise with many disparate technologies and architectures.
• Excellent communication skills, specifically in understanding, framing and simplifying both technical & business requirements.
• Experience mentoring and coaching more junior engineers on both technical and soft skills.
• Comfort with ambiguity and leading conversations where discordant views are present.
• Experience or strong interest in functional programming and its real-world applications - particularly Scala stacks such as Scalaz, Cats Effect and ZIO.
• Demonstrable experience working as part of a high performing, collaborative, agile team to deliver significant features / requirements.
• Experience of designing, building & operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.
• Experience with Cloud Infrastructure, preferably with AWS.
• Web services experience: including REST and GraphQL.
• Monitoring and optimising applications written for the JVM.
• Relational and NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, Aurora, & DynamoDB with experience modelling & optimising query performance.
• Kinesis or any other streaming data.
• Understanding of statistical analysis of data.
• Experience with or an interest in ''DevOps'' tooling & infrastructure as code.
• A strong understanding of continuous integration and continuous delivery practices.
• Demonstrable understanding of high-quality coding and testing practices.
• An appetite to learn new technologies and a drive for continual improvement.
• Contributions to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.

Benefits
• Flexible working hours
• 25 days holiday, rising to 27. Ability to purchase additional, up to 30.
• Up to 9% employer pension contribution
• Life assurance of 10x salary
• Personal accident and income protection insurance
• AXA Private medical insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Disney Store, Disney Parks, and many other Disney related perks.
• Enhanced maternity / paternity / adoption benefits
• Many other discounts and perks available via our benefits system

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r17kv0-3-149-229-253-42 in your application.