Lead Senior Associate | Data Engineering | Hyderabad | Engineering as a Service/ Operate

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.

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.

Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

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.

Job Summary:

We are seeking a Sr Data Engineer I to support the reliability, scalability, and performance of Disney’s Ad Technology big data platforms and pipelines. This role focuses on hands-on development and operations for Databricks, Spark, Flink, and Airflow (MWAA) environments, ensuring that production data workflows are resilient, cost-efficient, and performant at scale.

You will be responsible for building, optimizing, and supporting data pipelines, while contributing to automation, monitoring, and incident response. This role will work closely with platform, BI, and analytics teams to ensure data is delivered accurately and on time. As a Sr Data

Engineer I, you’ll also mentor junior engineers, contribute to runbooks, and help evolve best practices under the guidance of a Lead Engineer and Manager.

Responsibilities:

Pipeline Development & Operations:

Design, maintain, and optimize Spark and Flink pipelines running in Databricks and Airflow.

Ensure reliability and availability of data workflows in production.

Debug and resolve issues in notebooks, jobs, and orchestration workflows.

Performance Optimization:

Tune Spark jobs, clusters, and data pipelines for performance and cost efficiency.

Analyze logs, queries, and workloads to identify bottlenecks and implement improvements.

Monitoring & Observability:

Build and maintain dashboards, alerts, and metrics with Datadog, CloudWatch, or Prometheus.

Proactively monitor pipeline health and escalate issues as needed.

Incident Response & RCA:

Participate in incident response for pipeline issues, helping diagnose and resolve outages.

Contribute to RCA and preventative actions to improve long-term stability.

Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing:

Partner with data engineering, BI, and platform teams to support delivery and operations.

Document best practices, contribute to runbooks, and mentor junior engineers. Basic Qualifications:

• 4+ years of experience in data engineering or big data platform operations.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, Flink, or Airflow (MWAA) in production.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with ETL/ELT pipeline development.
• Familiarity with AWS services (S3, Glue, Athena, EMR, EKS) for pipeline management.
• Working knowledge of observability tools (Datadog, CloudWatch, Prometheus).
• Proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java for pipeline development and automation.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar).
• Strong collaboration and problem-solving skills, with experience in distributed teams. Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience with incident response and RCA in production data environments.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions).
• Exposure to data governance, access control, and cost optimization practices.
• Certifications such as Databricks Data Engineer Associate or AWS Solutions Architect – Associate. Required Education:
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent experience).