Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead marketing and consumer data capabilities across Disney Entertainment and ESPN. In this onsite role in New York, NY, you will serve as a senior technical leader for identity and device data products, including Identity360, supporting measurement, activation, and analytics at large scale.
What you’ll do
- Define and drive technical strategy for Identity and Device data products within Marketing and Consumer Data, including pipeline architecture, platform patterns, and a modernization roadmap in partnership with onshore squad leaders and enterprise architecture.
- Lead end-to-end delivery of complex, high-impact initiatives across Identity360, device and consumer identifier datasets, and dependent Marketing data products, establishing technical approach, sequencing, and quality expectations for other engineers.
- Act as principal SME and escalation point for identity foundational data, covering data modeling, batch and near-real-time processing, performance at scale, and production reliability, including participation in on-call rotation and incident leadership for critical pipelines.
- Establish and maintain engineering standards for the Identity and Device team and Marketing Data Engineering, including code quality, CI/CD, observability, and data governance aligned with GDPR, RTBF, and CCPA, while promoting reusable platform patterns across Databricks, AWS, and orchestration tooling.
- Mentor and develop engineers through design reviews, pairing, and coaching, building expertise in big-data engineering, identity domain knowledge, and operational excellence.
- Partner with Product, QA, Operations, Privacy/Legal, and peer Marketing data squads (Data Collection, Activation, Acquisition) to align requirements, resolve cross-domain dependencies, and represent technical decisions to stakeholders.
Required qualifications
- 10+ years of related big data engineering experience modeling and developing large data pipelines; experience with Python, Scala, or Java, and strong AWS fundamentals (S3, Lambda, IAM) preferred.
- 5+ years hands-on experience with performance tuning at scale using distributed systems such as Hadoop or Databricks compute, including tools/libraries such as Spark, Presto, and Hive for petabyte-level datasets.
- Experience with at least one major MPP or cloud database technology: Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, or Databricks.
- Solid understanding of data modeling and data warehousing methodologies and practices.
- Operational experience in multi-system production environments as a senior data engineer and point-of-contact/SME.
- Strong analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills with attention to detail.
- Experience with data integration and orchestration toolsets (for example, Airflow) and CI/CD.
- Demonstrated ability with cloud infrastructure technologies, including Terraform.
- Strong understanding of slowly changing dimensions (SCD tables) and building scalable, performant datasets.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience (education field is truncated in the source).
Technologies you’ll work with
Python, Scala, Java, AWS, S3, Lambda, IAM, Hadoop, Databricks, Spark, Presto, Hive, Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query, Airflow, CI/CD, Terraform, GDPR, RTBF, CCPA
Compensation and benefits
- Annual salary range: USD 187,900 - 252,000.
- Bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package.
- Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.
Pay transparency: The hiring range for this position in SFO, CA is $187,900 - $252,000 per year and New York is $179,700 - $241,000 per year. This position is with Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC, part of Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.
