Senior Data Engineer for AI-Driven Streaming Ads

The Walt Disney Company; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 142,000 - 199,000; Full time

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company in Seattle, WA is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and scale the data foundations powering AI-enabled advertising platforms across Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

You will own streaming and embedding pipelines, collaborate with AI core teams, mentor engineers, and deliver robust data solutions that enable faster, safer deployments for high-profile Disney ad tech applications.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a lead or senior technical role.
• Experience building and scaling streaming data pipelines in large-scale, distributed environments.
• Strong skills in Python, Java and SQL with expert level skill in either Python or Java.
• Proven experience building streaming data pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark, Kinesis).
• Experience with embedding pipelines and vector stores (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, pgvector).
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, storage optimization, and retrieval patterns for large-scale systems.
• Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, etc.).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, able to partner across AI engineering, infra, and product teams.
• Familiarity with testing, monitoring, and automation for data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain high-performance streaming and batch data pipelines that power AI applications, ensuring reliable low-latency ingestion and high-throughput processing.
• Implement and extend embedding generation workflows, vector store integrations, and retrieval pipelines supporting semantic search, RAG systems, and AI assistants.
• Develop and optimize scalable storage and retrieval patterns, focusing on cost-efficient architecture and smooth production performance.

Skills

5+ years data engineering

Streaming data pipelines

Python

Java

SQL

Team leadership

Collaboration

Testing & monitoring

Education

Bachelor or above in CS or related field

Tools

Databricks

LangChain

Vector Stores (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, pgvector)

Kafka

Flink

Spark

Kinesis

Airflow

Job description

The Walt Disney Company in Seattle, WA is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and scale the data foundations powering AI-enabled advertising platforms across Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

You will own streaming and embedding pipelines, collaborate with AI core teams, mentor engineers, and deliver robust data solutions that enable faster, safer deployments for high-profile Disney ad tech applications.