Sr Data Engineer

Job Summary

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 touchpoints serving millions worldwide.

• Building the future of Disney's media: Our technologists design and build the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach, Scale & Impact: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, ABC News, and many more serve millions globally. These products and brands matter to millions of people worldwide.
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex technical problems.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney's industry‑leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation and value across all media platforms. The Ads Data team, part of this organization, is on a mission to transform the advertising landscape across TV and streaming video through data and AI. We design and build solutions that measure and optimise the entire advertising lifecycle – from planning and activation to measurement and insights.

We are hiring a Senior Data Engineer to design, build and scale the data foundations that power AI adoption across Ad Technology. You will own how data flows into AI‑ready and optimized stores: streaming pipelines, embedding pipelines, vector stores and monitoring systems, and partner closely with the AI Core Engineering team to enable shared agents, registries and developer tools with robust, real‑time data.

• Build and maintain high‑performance streaming and batch data pipelines that power AI applications, ensuring reliable low‑latency ingestion and high‑throughput processing.
• Implement and extend embedding generation workflows, vector store integrations and retrieval pipelines supporting semantic search, RAG systems and AI assistants.
• Develop and optimise scalable storage and retrieval patterns, focusing on cost‑efficient architecture and smooth production performance.

• Implement AI‑optimised data models and storage patterns that align with broader enterprise architecture and platform requirements.
• Integrate pipelines with shared AI platform services (agent frameworks, registries, feature stores), ensuring clean, versioned, and reliable data delivery.
• Build reusable ingestion, transformation and data processing components that streamline adoption across engineering teams.

• Embed end‑to‑end observability into data systems, including metrics, structured logging, automated alerts, drift detection and failure analysis.
• Implement robust data quality validation, schema evolution safeguards and governance/compliance controls.
• Ensure deployed pipelines meet high standards for reliability, recoverability, auditability and long‑term maintenance.

• Drive execution by owning the full development lifecycle: prototyping, implementation, testing, deployment, optimisation and documentation.
• Collaborate closely with infrastructure, ML engineering, product and governance teams to deliver production‑ready AI capabilities.
• Lead by example through strong execution, high‑quality code and proactive problem‑solving.
• Influence design direction via technical proposals and hands‑on delivery rather than formal ownership of standards.

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 1…