Lead Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company; Orlando (FL); On-site; USD 152,000 - 205,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player seeks a Lead Software Engineer to enhance service reliability for cloud-based systems. In this dynamic role, you'll leverage your expertise to develop scalable solutions that support a broad range of services. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, you will ensure high performance and availability, while mentoring junior engineers. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to a world-class entertainment leader, where your work will directly impact the guest experience across various platforms. If you're passionate about technology and innovation, this position offers a chance to make a significant impact.

Benefits

Medical benefits

Financial benefits

Bonus opportunities

Long-term incentive units

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software development, with 3+ years in service reliability and distributed systems.
• Expert-level coding in Python with a focus on performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Establish SLIs and monitor system reliability and performance.
• Drive complex projects ensuring high availability and minimal downtime.

Skills

Service Reliability

Python

AWS

Cloud Infrastructure

CI/CD

DevOps

Observability

Agile

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Terraform

AWS CDK

DataDog

AppDynamics

New Relic

Docker

Job description

Lead Software Engineer

Job ID 10115921 Location Orlando, Florida, United States / Burbank, California, United States / Lake Buena Vista, Florida, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States Business Disney Experiences Date posted Mar. 20, 2025

Job Summary:

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

Are you passionate about working on large-scale, high-performance software systems with a strong focus on service reliability? Join our team as a Lead Software Engineer dedicated to ensuring the availability, scalability, and resilience of our cloud-based services. In this role, you’ll leverage your expertise in service reliability and cloud platforms to create scalable solutions that support the entire Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products segment. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, offering technical expertise to develop products and tooling, while ensuring the smooth delivery of features and capabilities for the Data Platform and Products team, ultimately enhancing the magic of our guests' experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Service Reliability: Establish key service-level indicators (SLIs) and continuously monitor them to ensure system reliability, availability, and performance. Proactively develop alerts and automated responses to prevent service degradation or outages.
• Lead Cross-Functional Projects: Drive complex projects across multiple teams and disciplines, ensuring high availability, resilience, and minimal downtime of services.
• Root Cause Analysis & Incident Response: Conduct deep analysis of system issues, identify root causes, and define actionable strategies for remediation. Lead post-mortem analysis and continuous improvement efforts.
• Infrastructure & System Optimization: Focus on the high availability, scalability, and performance of services in production environments, ensuring they meet business and customer needs.
• Capacity Planning & Right-Sizing: Lead efforts to ensure that services are properly scaled for current and future workloads. Engage in capacity planning to optimize resource utilization.
• Documentation & Runbooks: Maintain detailed documentation and create robust runbooks for incident management and troubleshooting, ensuring smooth responses to service disruptions.
• Cloud Infrastructure & IaC: Utilize tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to manage and automate infrastructure as code (IaC) in a cloud-native environment.
• Service Monitoring & Observability: Oversee observability and monitoring across the platform (AWS, serverless, containers, Snowflake, etc.), ensuring actionable insights are available for operational teams.
• Collaboration with Development Teams: Work closely with developers to ensure that applications are designed for service reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
• GitOps-Driven Environment: Drive infrastructure changes and service deployment using GitOps practices to ensure consistency and traceability in deployments.
• Code Quality: Write clean, performant, and well-documented application code with a focus on reliability and service availability.
• Automation & Tooling: Build and maintain automated deployment pipelines and tooling for monitoring and platform testing.
• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers and assist in technical decision-making and code reviews.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 7+ years of experience in software development, with at least 3 years focused on service reliability, data management, and distributed systems.
• Technical Expertise: Expert-level coding skills in Python, with a deep understanding of performance and resource optimization, including considerations of space and time complexity.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Strong experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS Fargate, S3, VPC, Kinesis, EventBridge, and related components.
• Serverless & Containers: Proven experience in working with serverless (AWS Lambda) and containerized environments (Docker, ECS, EKS).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with IaC tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK to automate infrastructure management.
• CI/CD & DevOps: Extensive experience in CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and general DevOps practices for continuous integration and deployment.
• Observability: Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools such as DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, or similar suites.
• Agile & DevOps: Strong proponent of Agile methodologies and application of DevOps principles for continuous improvement.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Certifications in AWS, Snowflake, or relevant service reliability tools.
• In-depth experience with observability suites and Application Performance Management (APM) tooling such as DataDog, AppDynamics, New Relic, etc.

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA is $152,200 - $204,100 per year.

The hiring range for this position in WA is $159,500 - $213,900 per year.

The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. 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.

About Disney Experiences:

Disney Experiences brings the magic of Disney stories and franchises to life through theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, unique vacation experiences, products and more around the world. Disney shines in the travel industry with six resort destinations in the United States, Europe and Asia; a top-rated cruise line; a popular vacation ownership program; and an award-winning guided family adventure business.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences.

This position is with Walt Disney Attractions Technology LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Experiences.

Walt Disney Attractions Technology LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law.

Disability Accommodation For Employment Applications

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities.