Lead Software Engineer - Ad Se

Job Description Overview

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

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.

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.

The Ad Serving Engineering organization within Disney Entertainment and the ESPN organization is fully responsible for building, enhancing and maintaining the high‑performance, distributed, microservice‑based Digital Advertising Platform. The platform is charged with the qualification, delivery, and tracking of Digital Advertising campaigns across all Disney online properties, including Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.

As part of our backend team, you’ll develop and support ad delivery systems for on‑demand and live TV content. Our stack includes Java, Spring, Kubernetes, AWS, and Terraform. You’ll work on services that handle high‑throughput ad requests, focusing on performance, reliability, and evolving the platform to support new ad formats. As a Lead Software Engineer, you will apply your deep technical knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, loosely coupled, encapsulated, and testable software.

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.
• Demonstrated project ownership.
• System and API design and implementation best practices; guide and mentor for micro‑service encapsulation and loose coupling.
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast‑paced environment.
• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well‑defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements.
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• A deep understanding of Java and the Software Development Lifecycle.

• Holistic understanding of the team’s domain and serving as a point of contact for stakeholders.
• Leading by example, supporting peers, and striving to improve code and design towards more scalable, clean, and decoupled implementations.
• Facilitate discussions and drive resolution, making sure outcomes are clear and well‑communicated.
• Designing, implementing, and testing solutions to various engineering problems in a high‑throughput, low‑latency microservices environment.
• Understanding and use of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.
• Reading and understanding product user stories, translating them into actionable tasks, and leading the team through their execution.
• Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors, and alerts.
• Available for on‑call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule.

• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Advanced proficiency with Java, including memory management, multi‑threading, profiling, thread pools, connection pools, and HTTP protocols.
• Demonstrable analytical / problem‑solving skills.
• Great communication, collaboration skills, and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Experience with Spring Boot and related Spring projects, non‑relational database technologies like Dynamo
  
  DB, caching data stores such as…