Senior Backend Engineer – Golang for News Platform

The Walt Disney Company; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 142,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company in California is seeking a Senior Product Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of scalable backend services for the News Distribution Platform. You will partner with product, design, and engineering teams to power reliable, low-latency experiences for millions of guests across Disney’s media properties.

You will own complex initiatives end-to-end, set architectural direction for distribution APIs, mentor engineers, and drive improvements in performance,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study.
• 5+ years of experience building and operating highly available, distributed backend systems in production environments.
• Strong experience designing and developing large-scale backend services using Golang (preferred) and/or Java.
• Experience deploying and scaling services within cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Deep understanding of caching technologies (such as Redis, Memcached, or similar).
• Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills, with the ability to inspire and empower a team towards achieving business goals.
• Strong problem-solving skills with a proactive, detail-oriented approach.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and source control systems (e.g., Git, Gitlab, Jenkins).
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring (e.g., Datadog, Grafana).
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments.
• Strong communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment.

Responsibilities

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from technical design through production deployment and operational excellence.
• Set the architectural direction of backend distribution APIs and services to ensure high availability, resiliency, and low latency at scale.
• Partner with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Strategically prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to deliver the highest-impact and most time-sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks to ensure successful execution.
• Champion engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Set standards for operational excellence, including monitoring, alerting, on-call processes, and post-incident analysis.
• Perform thorough code reviews and uphold a high standard of technical rigor and maintainability.
• Mentor and coach engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Drive performance optimization initiatives across services, caching layers, and data stores.
• Contribute to technical documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Golang/Java

Leadership

CI/CD

Agile/Scrum

Observability

Communication

Problem-solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

AWS

Redis / Memcached

Git / GitLab / Jenkins

Datadog

Grafana

Job description

The Walt Disney Company in California is seeking a Senior Product Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of scalable backend services for the News Distribution Platform. You will partner with product, design, and engineering teams to power reliable, low-latency experiences for millions of guests across Disney’s media properties.

You will own complex initiatives end-to-end, set architectural direction for distribution APIs, mentor engineers, and drive improvements in performance,