Manager, Software Engineering – BI & Analytics

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. 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.

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.

Responsibilities and duties of the role include instilling a culture grounded in engineering best practices such as code quality, documentation, automation, and continuous improvement; ensuring engineering principles are consistently applied across projects and teams; managing, mentoring, and growing a team of high-performing software and data engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative culture; coordinating with product management to align engineering roadmaps with product initiatives and timelines;

partnering with program managers to drive planning, prioritization, and delivery of cross-functional efforts; collaborating with QA leadership to build data quality processes and end-to-end validation; leading and growing a high-performing team of software and data engineers working on mission-critical data products; setting engineering roadmaps, delivery timelines, and platform-level initiatives; driving adoption of best-in-class tools and practices for data governance, lineage, observability, and cost optimization;

providing technical guidance and career development for the team; collaborating with senior leadership to define data strategy and long-term architecture vision; managing capacity planning, resource allocation, and performance reviews; leading vendor/tool evaluations and overseeing key integration efforts; partnering with BI and analytics leads to ensure consistent, reliable data is delivered across the enterprise; spearheading 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 prototyping UI components tailored to stakeholder/business requirements, ensuring high standards for usability, accessibility, and visual polish; and driving the integration of AI/ML solutions into both backend pipelines and analytics products; championing the use of AI-powered software development processes and robust, end-to-end SDLC practices.

Required education, experience/skills/training includes languages such as Scala, Python, SQL, JavaScript; data processing tools like Apache Spark, Flink, Airflow; platforms and tools such as Databricks, Hive, Presto, Snowflake; cloud services like AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Lambda); 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…