Manager, Software Engineering – BI & Analytics

Manager, Software Engineering, Focused On Bi & Analytics

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:

• 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.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Required Qualifications

• Languages:
  
  Scala, Python, SQL, Java Script
• Data Processing:
  Apache Spark, Flink, Airflow
• Platforms & Tools:
  Databricks, Hive, Presto, Snowflake
• Cloud: 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 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 Micro Strategy, 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 unacquainted audiences
• Experience in working with large datasets…