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.

We need your help to continue to scale until we've built a platform that can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

The User Services Teams

We are functional Scala enthusiasts (Cats / Scalaz / ZIO / shapeless etc) that care about following best practice. We're responsible for things like registration, login and authentication, profiles and personalisation and compliance for Disney+ & ESPN+
Our UK teams work in small, cross-functional squads that promote Agile practices. As a backend development team, we are experienced advocates of functional programming so you can expect to join a team that is applying principles from FP, Reactive Programming and Distributed Computing to build these services, using Scala, Akka, Kafka, Play and Cats, as well a wide range of cloud-native technologies including AWS (Kinesis, DynamoDB, Lambda), Docker and Serverless.

Been interested in Scala for a while? You have probably heard of Cake Solutions if so, which is how we began in London. Cake was acquired by Disney in 2018, so we have a lot of experienced engineers that are known across the Scala community.

We have a mature DevOps culture in place, where the team is responsible for the infrastructure and deployment of those applications - ''You build it, you run it.''

What you will do

You will have the opportunity to work on interesting projects using Scala, Akka, Kafka, Kinesis, and Dynamo with the aim to build software that is distributed, reactive, and scalable.

You will:
• Contribute to or lead a significant part of the implementation and deployment of services within your team.
• Work on challenging and varied business domains including video encoding, digital rights management, advertising, authentication, and payment services.
• Apply principled engineering practices including unit testing, integration testing, continuous integration and, by your example, lead others in your team to do likewise.
• 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.

You'll fit in well if you:
• Have some commercial experience with Scala
• Have experience or at least an interest in functional programming
• We'd love to see some prior experience with (or a willingness to learn) the Lightbend Reactive Platform, but any JVM (Scala, Java, Clojure) or Functional Language (Haskel, Lisp, Scheme) background is great!
• Experience creating scalable and reactive web applications with modern frameworks like Akka / play etc
• Have experience with public cloud technologies - We use AWS
• Have experience with or an interest in ''DevOps'' tooling
• Knowledge of applying object-oriented and functional programming styles to real-world software engineering problems.
• Demonstrable understanding of high-quality coding and testing practices.
• A strong understanding of continuous integration and continuous delivery 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.

The interview process

The process is straight forward and has 3 main stages. You'll be pleased to hear there's not a take-home test and the whole process can be done remotely if necessary.
It begins with an initial and very informal introduction call with the recruiter. From there if we both agree there's a good match, you'll have a 1-hour fact-finding/ fairly technical meeting with two members of the tech team. If we both agree to progress from here this will be followed by a 2-hour meeting with another two members of the engineering team. This stage will include a pair programming exercise.

Additional Information

We are (all things considered) a co-located end to end backend development team based out of our Waterloo office, and although currently, our teams are working remotely because of COVID, when it is safe to return to the office, we will do. We already have a relaxed and flexible approach to remote work and working hours but we agree we work at our best when we can collaborate in close proximity.

We are an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, colour, religion or belief, sex, nationality, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marital or civil partner status, disability or pregnancy or maternity. Disney fosters a business culture where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a rapidly changing world.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-rvok0m-18-191-5-239-42 in your application.