Senior Backend Engineer - Data Pipelines and Scale

5014 Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC; California (MO); On-site; USD 155,000 - 208,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Development Engineer to design and build backend services using Java and Scala. You will work on large-scale, production-grade systems and data pipelines in a fast-paced environment.

You will maintain ML models, improve service performance, and collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure teams to drive scalable platforms across the Disney ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development in backend languages (Java/Scala).
• Experience building large-scale production backend services.
• Strong distributed systems, data processing, and performance optimization.
• Experience with offline ETL pipelines and large-scale data processing.
• Experience maintaining ML models in production.
• Strong DB design and query optimization.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced engineering environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services using Java and Scala.
• Develop scalable systems that support User Enablement capabilities.
• Build, operate, and optimize offline ETL pipelines that process massive data volumes.
• Maintain and deploy machine learning models associated with critical backend services.
• Improve service performance, scalability, stability, and operational excellence.
• Diagnose, debug, and resolve production issues across distributed backend systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including product, data, platform, and infrastructure teams.
• Develop and maintain automation test frameworks, test tools, and software quality practices.
• Contribute to architecture discussions and help evolve services to support long-term business growth.

Skills

Java/Scala backend

Distributed systems

ETL pipelines

ML model deployment

Testing frameworks

Communication skills

Problem-solving

Education

BS in CS/Engineering

MS in CS/Engineering

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Airflow

Hadoop

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Development Engineer to design and build backend services using Java and Scala. You will work on large-scale, production-grade systems and data pipelines in a fast-paced environment.

You will maintain ML models, improve service performance, and collaborate with product, data, and infrastructure teams to drive scalable platforms across the Disney ecosystem.