Senior Data Engineer: Real-Time AI Pipelines

The Walt Disney Company; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 139,000 - 186,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and scale data foundations powering AI adoption across Ad Tech. You’ll own data flows from streaming pipelines to vector stores and monitoring systems, partnering with AI Core Engineering for robust, real‑time data delivery.

You will mentor engineers, drive end‑to‑end data solutions, and collaborate with infrastructure, ML, product, and governance teams to deliver production‑ready AI

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience with leadership exposure.
• Experience building and scaling streaming data pipelines in large-scale environments.
• Strong skills in Python, Java, and SQL with expert level in Python or Java.
• Proven experience with streaming pipelines (Kafka, Flink, Spark, Kinesis).
• Experience embedding pipelines and vector stores.
• Knowledge of data modeling and storage optimization for large-scale systems.
• Hands-on with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills; testing, monitoring, and automation awareness.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain high‑performance streaming and batch data pipelines.
• Implement embedding generation workflows and vector store integrations.
• Develop scalable storage and retrieval patterns for cost‑effective architecture.

Skills

Data engineering

Streaming pipelines

Python

Java

SQL

Embeddings

Vector stores

Airflow

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Databricks

LangChain

Vector Stores (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, pgvector)

SQL

AWS (S3, Glue, MWAA)

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and scale data foundations powering AI adoption across Ad Tech. You’ll own data flows from streaming pipelines to vector stores and monitoring systems, partnering with AI Core Engineering for robust, real‑time data delivery.

You will mentor engineers, drive end‑to‑end data solutions, and collaborate with infrastructure, ML, product, and governance teams to deliver production‑ready AI