Senior Database Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

1. Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
2. Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
3. Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Job Summary:

The individual in this position will join the Data Stores team in an exciting and fast-paced environment where they will help build and maintain highly available relational database systems operating across multiple cloud and on-premise environments. These databases support many of the systems powering DE&ET’s digital media supply chain and consumer facing products.

We’re looking for an individual who can apply software engineering principles to database engineering and administration to build processes and automation to help deliver infrastructure faster, safer, more consistently, and with the right level of observability required to operate at scale.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

1. Responsible for building, deploying, and ensuring all DE&ET database infrastructure is available 24/7/365.
2. Leverage software development and automation to design, modernize, and deliver database infrastructure.
3. Participates in setting the architectural direction for database platforms and projects.
4. Manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced, deadline-oriented environment.
5. Analyze, design, and deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, and highly available database infrastructure.
6. Proactively plan and implement infrastructure changes through capacity forecasting, software release cycles, and right sizing.
7. Provide database expertise through performance tuning, troubleshooting and administration.
8. Develop, enhance, and adhere to engineering and administration standards.
9. Develop automation and tooling to increase operational efficiency while ensuring system reliability and security.
10. Build infrastructure and systems for scalability, resiliency, availability, and recovery through infrastructure as code and configuration management.
11. Provide relevant insights of data store infrastructure through metrics, monitoring, and alerting.
12. Maintain thorough and well-written documentation.
13. Participate in live event support and on-call rotation.
14. May provide oversight and direction to junior team members.
15. Builds relationships with engineering teams and leads.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

1. 5+ years of related work experience with Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Azure SQL, and Azure SQL MI.
2. Fundamental understanding of Microsoft SQL Server database internals.
3. Experience working in Agile software development.
4. Experience with source control management tools (Git, GitLab, GitHub).
5. Intermediate to advanced level of expertise in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, or Go.
6. General understanding and experience with Windows operating system, network, and containers.
7. Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
8. Experience designing and deploying fault-tolerant, distributed, and highly available database infrastructure.
9. Experience in database availability monitoring and status reporting using native monitoring tools.
10. Well-versed in SQL Server backup, restore, and recovery strategies.
11. Experience keeping a large environment compliant by deploying SQL Server patches and upgrades.
12. Experience with disaster recovery planning and implementation.
13. Carries out assignments with little coaching or guidance from others.

Required Education:

1. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Experience operating within a database reliability engineering (DRE) and/or systems reliability engineering (SRE) role.
2. Experience running, deploying, and maintaining production systems in Azure and Amazon Web Services.
3. Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
4. Experience building a proper path to production leveraging multiple lifecycles, testing, integration, and CI/CD pipelines.
5. Experience with the configuration and implementation of SQL Server Always On availability groups.
6. Experience with configuration management (Ansible, Chef).
7. Comfortable collaborating with cross-functional teams providing guidance in SQL Server best practices.
8. Experience with proactively identifying problems/areas of improvement and designing creative solutions to successfully remediate issues.

The hiring range for this position in Bristol or Los Angeles is $112,600 to $151,000 per year, in New York City or Seattle is $117,000 to $156,000 per year and in San Francisco is $122,000 to $127,000. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.