Lead Software Engineer

Job  
Location Lake Buena Vista, Florida, United States Business Disney Experiences Date posted out.. 16, 2026

"We Power the Magic!" That's our motto at Disney Experiences Technology (DXT). Our team creates world-class immersive digital experiences for the Company's premier vacation brands, including Disney's Parks & Resorts. We are responsible for the end-to-end digital and physical Guest experience for all technology and digital-led initiatives across Food & Beverage, and Merchandise lines of business.

This role sits within the Retail & Restaurant Technology organization and supports the Point of Sale (POS) platform — the system that powers every merchandise and dining transaction across our parks and resorts. Our platform is a large-scale, distributed, event-driven system. We work with a polyglot stack (PHP, Go, Python, Java) that we are actively modernizing, and we need engineers who embrace the platform as it is while helping shape what it becomes.

The main client of our services is the POS terminal itself — an Android-based hardware device used by thousands of Cast Members every day — so reliability, performance, and thoughtful API design directly impact the Guest and Cast experience.

The Lead Software Engineer will report to the Manager, Software Engineering.

• Lead and personally build (hands‑on coding expected) scalable, well‑documented backend services and APIs across our polyglot platform — PHP and Go microservices today, with a growing Java/Spring footprint — from technical specification through production delivery.
• Set architectural direction for the POS platform: translate complex functional, technical, and business requirements into solution and system designs, produce architecture diagrams and proof‑of‑concepts, evaluate technology choices, and ensure new solutions integrate cleanly with surrounding Disney systems.
• Drive the modernization roadmap, playing a leading technical role in the migration of existing PHP and Go microservices into Java/Spring applications — defining migration patterns, sequencing, coexistence strategies, and quality gates so we modernize without disrupting daily park operations.
• Own the full software development life cycle for your team's deliverables: planning, estimation, design reviews, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, production support, and post‑incident root‑cause analysis.
• Lead and mentor a team of backend Software Engineers — provide day‑to‑day technical direction, unblock engineers, review designs and code, grow junior talent, and foster a culture of engineering excellence and psychological safety.
• Assess and communicate risk: identify technical, delivery, and operational risks early; give clear direction on trade‑offs; and upscale to leadership with well‑formed options and recommendations when decisions exceed the team's authority.
• Design and operate event‑driven and streaming integrations using Amazon Kinesis and RabbitMQ, ensuring our transaction, inventory, and reporting flows are resilient, idempotent, and observable.
• Steward our data layer, designing performant schemas and access patterns on Amazon Aurora (MySQL‑compatible), guiding ORM usage, and safeguarding transactional integrity for a system where every record represents real money and a real Guest.
• Champion AI‑assisted engineering, embedding tools such as Claude, Cursor, and Codex into the team's daily workflow — from design and coding to testing and troubleshooting — and shaping responsible adoption practices that raise both velocity and quality.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with product owners, program management, architecture, QA, hardware/terminal teams, and vendor partners to align solutions with current and future business needs, and…