Software Engineering Tech Lead

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, then 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 as a wide range of cloud-native technologies including AWS (Kinesis, DynamoDB, Lambda), Docker and Serverless. We operate a ''You build it, you run it'' culture within our teams.

What you will do

You will be a key member of a software development team, leading the design and production of services and functionality to support Identity management capabilities across Disney+ and ESPN+. This includes high traffic API services, event-driven processes, a sizable globally-distributed data repository and the provision of real-time data streams.
You will contribute to and be part of an engaging, dynamic and inclusive engineering team, grounded in scrum and agile practices, CI/CD, great collaboration, functional programming and are motivated by a commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

You will:
• Collaborate in the design, build, and evolution of the backend services that power the Disney+ platform.
• Manage a product engineering team, ultimately responsible for the delivery of that product.
• Mentor your team to improve technical ability and build a profile within and outside the organisation.
• Engineer technical software solutions primarily using Scala based microservices deployed within AWS infrastructure.
• Support high traffic API services, globally distributed data and apply event-driven architectures.
• Influence and drive software engineering and architecture best practices and standards within the team and the wider community.
• Challenge technical and architectural decisions within the team.

You'll fit in well if you:
• Have commercial functional programming experience, preferably with Scala.
• Have experience with Cloud Infrastructure, preferably with AWS.
• Think not just in terms of code, but architecture. You communicate your ideas effectively to others within your team.
• Have data systems experience with relational or NoSQL DBs preferably at scale.
• Are experienced building highly available, mission-critical, high traffic systems.
• Have experience with event-driven systems, data streaming and analytics, and challenges of distributed and globally available systems engineering.
• Contribute to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.
• Have a broad and deep technical knowledge and hands-on expertise with many disparate technologies and programming languages.
• Have the ability to dive deep into any technical component as well as understand and drive the overall systems architecture.
• Are excellent at articulating problems and bringing together peers to achieve the best solution for the business.
• Demonstrate significant creativity and high judgement in your work.
• Are looked to as an expert in your field.

The Interview Process

The process is straight forward and has three main stages. You'll be pleased to know there is no take-home test and the whole process will be done remotely.

It begins with an initial and very informal introduction call with the recruiter. From there if we both agree there is a good match, you will have a one hour fact-finding / technical meeting with two members of the technical team. If we both agree to progress from there, this will be followed by a two hour meeting with another two members of the technical 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 London, although currently our teams are working remotely following the pandemic, 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 together.
On offer is a competitive salary which is complemented by a Disney benefits and rewards package which includes LTI bonus (long-term-incentive), pension, holiday allowance, annual bonuses, Disney parks & resorts passes and discounts on Disney merchandise.

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, 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-r0mpe8-3-139-82-23-42 in your application.