Full-Stack Developer

🚀 The Opportunity

At Walt Disney Animation Studios we have a deep commitment to the philosophy that creativity inspires technology, and technology inspires creativity. The Information Services (Info Serv) team is seeking a Full-Stack Developer with experience building out modern web-based internal business applications to be a stabilizing force. We don't just need a coder; we need someone who can translate the needs of our stakeholders into solutions, take ownership of core applications, and crush our backlog.

Our group supports 15+ stakeholder departments—including Analytics, Production Management, HR, Training, and Studio Leadership—and maintains ~20 internal business applications. Your mission will be to bring stability, predictability, and technical excellence to this complex environment. You will be expected to contribute toward solving our most challenging technical problems, safeguarding our core business functions and partner with others to explore new initiatives, like implementing AI functionality into our solutions.

If you are a pragmatic problem-solver who loves building and bringing order to chaos, this is the role for you.

• Lead Core Development: Take an ownership role in designing, building, and maintaining critical internal web applications using our React, Django, and Python stack.

• Crush the Backlog: Systematically work through our application backlog, delivering high-priority features and improvements with high-quality, tested code.

• Share Best Practices with the Team: Act as a technical leader and mentor for other developers in regards to best web and development practices. You'll elevate the team's skills through insightful code reviews, pair programming, and establishing standards.

• Tackle Legacy Systems: Fearlessly dive into our legacy applications (including PHP, Ruby, etc.) to troubleshoot, support, maintain, and strategically modernize them.

• Collaborate & Prioritize: Work directly with our 15+ stakeholder departments to understand their needs and translate them into clear technical requirements. You'll be a key voice in helping the team balance and prioritize competing requests.

• Own the Architecture: Participate in architectural decisions and our "build vs. buy" analysis for new projects, ensuring our solutions are scalable and maintainable.

• Drive Agile Practice: Be a role model for our collaborative, 2-week Agile sprint process, helping the team with accurate estimation and a focus on shipping value.

• Extensive Full-Stack
  
  Experience:
  
  3+ years of proven experience in building, shipping, and maintaining complex, data-driven web applications in a production environment.

• Expert-Level Python & Django: Deep mastery of Python and the Django framework. You should be able to build complex features, optimize performance, and understand the framework's "magic."

• 
  
  Experience with RESTful/Graph
  
  QL APIs: Proven experience in the design, development, and maintenance of high-performance, scalable, and secure APIs (often RESTful, sometimes Graph
  
  QL) to support both internal and external services.

• Strong Front-End
  
  Skills:
  
  Proficiency in a modern JavaScript-based framework, ideally React and superset language, like Typescript. You can build and maintain sophisticated user interfaces.

• The "Legacy Whisperer": You must be willing and able to read, understand, and refactor code you didn't write using all the tools at your disposal (including coding assistants). Experience with (or at least a lack of fear of) legacy languages like PHP or Ruby is important.

• Exceptional Communication: You are a clear, proactive communicator who can collaborate with technical peers and non-technical stakeholders alike.

• Pragmatic Problem-Solver: You have a "get-it-done" attitude and an almost unflappable ability to context-shift and manage competing priorities without getting frustrated.

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or equivalent experience.

• Experience integrating AI features into web based solutions to improve the experience of end users. This includes demonstrable…