Tech Lead - Scala

Disney Streaming encompasses the teams leading the Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and Star+ streaming services within the Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution group. We sit at the intersection between entertainment, sports, and technology and seek to connect viewers with the stories they love, while driving the streaming industry forward with consumer-first innovation.

Our core mission is to deliver global audiences the freedom to access content on their terms across any connected device, time or location. We serve consumers by bringing the world’s most beloved characters, timeless stories, legendary athletes, and epic sporting events to global audiences through best-in-class direct-to-consumer video services.

Disney+ topped 100 million active subscribers just 16 months from launching and we have aspirations for many more. Ensuring all of our millions of users have the magical experience they come to expect from Disney, when watching their favourite shows is a challenge that we relish. This means scaling, and reliability is our primary focus in everything we build.

The User Services Teams:

We are functional Scala enthusiasts (Cats / Scalaz / ZIO / shapeless etc) that care about following best practice. We're responsible for things like registration, login and authentication, profiles and personalisation and compliance for Disney+ & ESPN+

Our UK teams work in small, cross-functional squads that promote Agile practices. As a backend development team, we are experienced advocates of functional programming so you can expect to join a team that is applying principles from FP, Reactive Programming and Distributed Computing to build these services, using Scala, Akka, Kafka, Play and Cats, as well a wide range of cloud-native technologies including AWS (Kinesis, DynamoDB, Lambda), Docker and Serverless.

We have a mature DevOps culture in place, where the team is responsible for the infrastructure and deployment of those applications - "You build it, you run it."

What you will do:

You will be using Scala, Akka, Kafka, Kinesis, and Dynamo to build and innovate our software that is distributed, reactive, and scalable.

You will:

• Lead a product engineering team, ultimately responsible for the delivery of that product
• Lead the design, build, and evolution of the backend services that power the Disney+ platform
• Mentor your team to improve technical ability and build a profile within and outside the organisation
• Engineer technical software solutions primarily using Scala based microservices deployed within AWS infrastructure
• Support high traffic API services, globally distributed data and apply event-driven architectures
• Influence and drive software engineering and architecture best practices and standards within the team and the wider community
• Apply principled engineering practices including unit testing, integration testing, continuous integration and, by your example, lead others in your team to do likewise.
• Act as a mentor and an example to others in your team and across the organisation.
• Think not just in terms of code, but architecture. You communicate your ideas effectively to others within your team.

Essential Requirements:

• Strong commercial experience with Scala
• Have experience in functional programming
• Have strong experience with public cloud technologies - We use AWS
• Experience creating scalable and reactive web applications with modern frameworks like Akka / play etc
• Have data systems experience with relational or NoSQL DBs preferably at scale.
• Have experience building highly available, mission-critical, high traffic systems.
• Event-driven systems, data streaming and analytics, and challenges of distributed and globally available systems engineering.
• Ability to dive deep into any technical component as well as understand and drive the overall systems architecture.

Desirable Skills:

• Experience with the Lightbend Reactive Platform, but any JVM (Scala, Java, Clojure) or Functional Language (Haskel, Lisp, Scheme).
• Have experience with "DevOps" tooling.
• A strong understanding of continuous integration and continuous delivery practices.
• Contributions to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.