Scala Technical Team Lead

Job Description

Disney+ launched in North America, Australia, and New Zealand at the end of 2019. At the end of March 2020 we launched in some parts of Europe and we now have over 60 million subscribers globally.

We are looking for a Scala Tech Lead to join us from our Waterloo, London office as we continue to scale our Products globally.

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. 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.
• Event-driven systems, data streaming and analytics, and challenges of distributed and globally available systems engineering.
• Contributions to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.
• Broad and deep technical knowledge and hands-on expertise with many disparate technologies and programming languages.
• Ability to dive deep into any technical component as well as understand and drive the overall systems architecture.
• Excellent at articulating problems and bringing together peers to achieve the best solution for the business.
• Demonstrate significant creativity and high judgment in your work.
• You are looked to as an expert in your given field.

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.