The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.  

 
 Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here: 

 1. Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come. 

2. Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.  

3. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms. 

Job Summary:

We’re seeking a Senior Staff Product Development Engineer to drive the cloud-native infrastructure and DevOps engineering that underpins Disney’s Ad Technology data platforms, supporting critical big data pipelines across Hulu, Disney+ and other ad platforms. These systems process massive volumes of streaming data and operate at global scale, with uncompromising requirements for availability, low latency, security, and resilience. 

In this role, you’ll combine hands-on cloud-native expertise with technical leadership to design, automate, and scale the infrastructure powering data workloads. Today this includes Spark and Flink on AWS EKS and Airflow (MWAA), with a strategic shift underway to Databricks for compute and orchestration. You’ll guide system design, reliability engineering, and automation across core AWS services (EKS, VPC, IAM, ALB/NLB, RDS, S3, managed data services) and DevOps platforms (Terraform, Jenkins, Spinnaker, GitHub Actions, observability tooling). You’ll also mentor engineers, set best practices, and lead platform migrations to ensure reliable, cost-efficient, and secure data operations at scale. 

If you’re passionate about building and operating globally distributed, low-latency data platforms and want to directly influence the pipelines that power Disney’s ad business, this role offers both scale and impact.

Responsibilities:

• Cloud-Native Technical Leadership & Design: Define infrastructure and DevOps strategy for big data pipelines, guiding architectural decisions across AWS, EKS, Airflow, and Databricks. Shape long-term standards for globally distributed, high-availability, low-latency data systems. 

• Hands-on Engineering & Automation: Build and enhance Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines, observability integrations, and automation frameworks for Spark, Flink, Airflow, and Databricks workloads. Champion automation-first culture across data infra.  

• Incident Response & Escalation: Act as senior technical escalation point for business-critical data pipeline incidents. Apply expert troubleshooting skills to resolve production issues quickly, safeguard SLAs, and prevent downstream business impact.  

• Mentorship & Code Reviews: Mentor engineers on infrastructure best practices, design reviews, and code quality. Foster a culture of accountability, knowledge sharing, and operational excellence across the data infra team. 

• Platform Migrations & Reliability Initiatives: Lead migrations from MWAA to Databricks and Spark/Flink modernization initiatives. Drive cost optimization, reliability engineering, and large-scale upgrades for secure, resilient, and efficient data platforms. 

Basic Qualifications:  

• 6+ years in infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering, with experience supporting big data workloads at scale. 

• Deep expertise with AWS infrastructure (EKS, IAM, VPC, ALB/NLB, RDS, S3, CloudWatch) and related managed services. 

• Serve as an AWS infrastructure and managed services expert, guiding resilient, cost-optimized, and secure deployments for large-scale data platforms. 

• Hands-on experience operating Spark and Flink on Kubernetes (EKS) and MWAA in production. 

• Working knowledge of Databricks, with proven ability to design and operate jobs in both MWAA and Databricks orchestration environments. 

• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, Spinnaker, GitHub Actions). 

• Proven ability to lead incident response, root cause analysis, and troubleshooting for high-severity data pipeline incidents. 

• Strong track record of mentoring engineers and raising standards in reliability, automation, and security. 

• Exceptional communication skills to align direction across distributed teams and partner closely with data engineering. 

• Demonstrated ownership and accountability for end-to-end delivery in mission-critical, globally distributed systems. 

• Experience operating cloud-native data platform infrastructure with five nines (99.999%) uptime targets, ensuring ultra-high availability and resilience. 

Preferred Qualifications:  

• Proven experience at MAANG or other top-tier technology companies, demonstrating ability to deliver in high-scale, mission-critical environments. 

• Experience leading migrations from MWAA to Databricks or Spark/Flink modernization initiatives. 

• Familiarity with observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, etc.) and latency/throughput monitoring at scale. 

• Knowledge of cloud-native security practices (IAM, TLS, workload identity, zero trust). 

• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). 

• Background in ad technology, data-intensive systems, or regulated industries (SOX, CCPA, GDPR). 

Required Education:   

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred), or equivalent experience.