Sr Data Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

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.

The Ads Data team, part of Disney's Ad Platforms organization, is on a mission to transform the advertising landscape across TV and streaming video through the power of data and AI. We design and build innovative solutions that measure and optimize 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. In this role, you will own how data flows into AI ready and optimized stores, from streaming pipelines and embedding pipelines to vector stores and monitoring systems.

You’ll partner closely with the AI Core Engineering team to enable shared agents, registries, and developer tools with robust, reliable, real‑time data. As a Senior Engineer, you will design and implement robust data engineering solutions, mentor junior team members, and build resilient pipelines that support high‑profile AI applications.

• 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 optimize scalable storage and retrieval patterns, focusing on cost‑efficient architecture and smooth production performance.

• Implement AI‑optimized 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, optimization, 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 through technical proposals and hands‑on delivery rather than formal ownership of standards.

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a lead or senior technical role.
• Experience building and scaling streaming data pipelines in large‑scale, distributed environments.
• Strong skills in Python, Java and SQL with expert level skill in either Python or Java.
• Experience with embedding pipelines and vector stores (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, pgvector).
• Strong knowledge of data modeling, storage optimization, and retrieval patterns for large‑scale systems.
• Hands‑on experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, etc.).
• Strong collaboration and…