Senior Software Developer, Scala

November 29, 2024

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.

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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:

Contribute to or lead a significant part of the implementation and deployment of services within your team.
Work on challenging and varied business domains including video encoding, digital rights management, advertising, authentication, and payment services.
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.

Essential Requirements:

Commercial experience with Scala
Have experience or at least an interest in functional programming
Have experience with public cloud technologies - We use AWS
Knowledge of applying object-oriented and functional programming styles to real-world software engineering problems.
Experience creating scalable and reactive web applications with modern frameworks like Akka / play etc

Desirable Skills:

Experience with (or a willingness to learn) the Lightbend Reactive Platform, but any JVM (Scala, Java, Clojure) or Functional Language (Haskel, Lisp, Scheme) background is great!
Have experience with or an interest in "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.

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