Manager, Software Engineering - BI & Analytics

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.

About the role

We are seeking a Manager, Software Engineering, focused on BI & Analytics to lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary team in building and maintaining the data pipelines, AI-powered data solutions, and custom analytics UIs and dashboards that are foundational to Disney's Ad Platforms. In this role, you'll manage both frontend and backend software & data engineering, ensuring that business and end-user needs are met with reliability, scalability, and outstanding UI/UX design. The ideal candidate will be both a technical leader and a people manager with deep expertise in software, data engineering and platform strategy.

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Instill a culture grounded in engineering best practices such as code quality, documentation, automation, and continuous improvement
• Ensure engineering principles are consistently applied across projects and teams
• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of high-performing software and data engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative culture
• Coordinate with Product Management to align engineering roadmaps with product initiatives and timelines
• Partner with Program Managers to drive planning, prioritization, and delivery of cross-functional efforts
• Collaborate with QA leadership to build data quality processes and end-to-end validation
• Lead and grow a high-performing team of software and data engineers working on mission-critical data products
• Set engineering roadmaps, delivery timelines, and platform-level initiatives
• Drive adoption of best-in-class tools and practices for data governance, lineage, observability, and cost optimization
• Provide technical guidance and career development for the team
• Collaborate with senior leadership to define data strategy and long-term architecture vision
• Manage capacity planning, resource allocation, and performance reviews
• Lead vendor/tool evaluations and oversee key integration efforts
• Partner with BI and analytics leads to ensure consistent, reliable data is delivered across the enterprise
• Spearhead the implementation of custom dashboards and analytics UIs, leveraging modern web frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, etc.), advanced data visualization, and design system best practices
• Rapidly prototype UI components tailored to stakeholder/business requirements, ensuring high standards for usability, accessibility, and visual polish
• Drive the integration of AI/ML solutions into both backend pipelines and analytics products; champion the use of AI-powered software development processes and robust, end-to-end SDLC practices

Requirements

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant software engineering, data engineering or data science - preferably with a digital media or digital advertising company
• Experience delivering products in an agile software development environment including sprint work in Jira
• Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to collaborate and partner across multiple teams and organizations
• Strong SQL experience including writing/optimizing complex queries against distributed data stores such as Aurora, Hadoop, Hive, Oracle, and Snowflake
• Experience with data pipeline and workflow management tools: Apache NiFi or Apache Airflow
• Expert level knowledge in at least one programming language such as Python, R, Scala, Java
• Demonstrated experience working with business intelligence tools such as MicroStrategy, Tableau, Business Objects, Looker, etc.
• Strong experience building and deploying dashboards and UIs with frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue
• Demonstrated ability to quickly prototype and implement custom UI components to meet evolving business/stakeholder specs
• Familiarity with AI-powered solution development and integrating machine learning into production data/analytics environments
• Strong software development life cycle (SDLC) management experience, including source control, CI/CD, and agile workflows (Jira)
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience in working with large datasets (Terabytes or more)
• Strong presentation and documentation skills including experience working with Confluence, PowerPoint, and Lucid Chart
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills
• Enjoy working collaboratively with a talented group of people to tackle challenging business problems so we all succeed (or fail fast) as a team

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related technical fields, or equivalent experience
• Languages: Scala, Python, SQL, JavaScript
• Data Processing: Apache Spark, Flink, Airflow
• Platforms & Tools: Databricks, Hive, Presto, Snowflake
• Cloud: AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Lambda)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing, building and supporting Business Intelligence (BI) data platforms, dashboards, and reporting environments
• Experience in Ad Tech, particularly Linear or Addressable Advertising
• Experience with digital advertising systems and ecosystems
• Experience using data analytics to triage and troubleshoot advertising workflows
• Experience with network topologies, systems architecture overviews, and entity relationship diagrams (ERD)
• Experience with rapid prototyping and agile delivery of analytics products

Schedule

Engineers are expected to be in the office four days a week.

Pay

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA is between $171,600 - $230,100, Seattle, WA is between $179,700 - $241,000 and San Francisco, CA is between $187,900 - $252,000. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.