Lead Software Engineer

Job Posting Title:

Lead Software Engineer

Req ID:

10117313

Job Description:

“We Power the Magic!” That’s our motto at Disney Experiences (DX). Our team creates world-class immersive digital experiences for the Company’s premier vacation brands including Disney’s Parks & Resorts worldwide, Disney Cruise Line, Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa, and Disney Vacation Club.

The Lead Software Engineer role is for our Search team, building out and supporting site search solutions for our biggest brands, helping millions of guests find the information they need to have the best Parks experience possible.

The Lead Software Engineer applies practical knowledge of development and engineering to conceive, design, develop, test, and implement software fixes, enhancements, components, and/or new software systems and applications of moderate to high complexity. The Lead Software Engineer owns design and development and drives development of components through their own and subordinate engineers’ work. The Lead Software Engineer provides technical guidance and acts as a point of escalation and technical expert. The Lead Software Engineer designs and develops highly scalable software systems and applications.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Owns the design and development of our Search software platform including AI-powered search; responsible for software fixes, enhancements, components, capabilities, and/or new software systems and applications

• Keeps informed on the rapidly changing AI space, champions new ideas to product partners and leadership, and incorporates new features into the Search platform that directly improve Guest experiences

• Drives development of software through own and subordinate engineers' work

• Develops technical solutions that meet specifications and that impact future developments

• Executes assigned capability level software development projects and major fixes using new or existing technologies

• Develops specifications for assigned components, projects or fixes

• Leads programming, testing and debugging of applications or fixes to existing applications

• Creates protocols, documentation and tools for installation and maintenance

• Sets the architectural direction for software development projects

• Designs specific components for assigned projects, developing specifications for each

• Designs, develops, manages, creates and maintains technical components and templates

• Codes against front-end technology stack and leads end-to-end troubleshooting

• Interacts and coordinates deliverables with other technical groups in the organization

• Executes assigned capability level projects using new or existing technologies

• Reviews or troubleshoots and performs testing

• Conceives and sets the architectural direction for development projects

• Designs the component tasks of assigned projects, developing specifications for each

• Serves as a high-level technical resource and “go-to” person for less experienced developers, providing technical guidance and oversight

• Leads team members in problem analysis and issue resolution

• Recommends improvements to processes, technology, and interfaces that improve the effectiveness of the team

• Work with Product, Creative, and Technology partners to develop web applications

• Engineer solutions, code web applications, resolve defects, performance tune, and deploy code

• Participate in team scrums and other agile process/ceremony

Qualifications:

• Expert level skills with at least one enterprise search platform such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Solr

• Experience with AI concepts and ecosystems, especially in the context of search, such as vector databases and embeddings, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), prompt engineering, agentic design, retrieval and generation metrics and evaluation, and guardrails

• 7+ years of progressively related experience in design, development, and implementation of highly scalable, high-volume software systems and components, client-facing web applications, and major Internet-oriented applications and systems

• Experience with Java development frameworks & tools, such as JetBrains and Eclipse

• Experience with Java, Spring, Splunk, Swagger/OpenAPI, and REST

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with current Spring versions

• Experience with DevOps, toolchains, pipelines, Git, and bundling tools

• Experience with Cloud providers such as AWS and GCP, and their serverless offe