Senior Application Engineer

Job Summary:

The Decision Science team focuses on creating innovative mathematical models to inform business decision making through data. The team is interested in all fields related to data science, with emphasis on statistics, operations research, econometrics, and machine learning.

The Decision Science team resides within the Disney Decision Science + Integration (DDSI) organization. DDSI provides internal consulting services for clients across The Walt Disney Company. The DDSI team sits at the intersection of business strategy, advanced analytics, and technology integration to help our partners explore opportunities for analytics, shape business decisions, and drive value. Our work includes conceptualizing new solutions, solution design and development, implementation and integration with business processes, and ongoing business support.

The Senior Application Engineer will design, build, ship and maintain full-stack web-based analytic platforms. These platforms centered around scientific models, based on distinction in breadth or depth of technical knowledge, and on this basis create reusable software and system components that have potential for broad use. This role requires technical expertise, creative thinking, a sense of urgency, attention to detail, a platform mindset, a collaborative work ethic, and minimum supervision.

Responsibilities:

• Be a part of DDSI's Transformation team consisting of data scientists and data engineers to work on Analytics Innovation Services (AIS), an enterprise-level ecosystem for data science community of practitioners consisting of a suite of shareable science, data, and utility services by applying emerging science, tools, and technologies pertaining to analytics platform and product initiatives.
• Design, produce, and ship cutting-edge software platform for serving strategic internal business decision-makers across the Walt Disney Company.
• Create APIs for inter-process communication using best practices and features (i.e., paging, OAuth, REST, JSON, etc.)
• Innovate by researching and championing new methods to solve complex software problems.
• Coordinate with Data Science teams to gather requirements from the science models and workflow.
• Coordinate with Data Engineering teams to develop data routines for storage, retrieval and archival.
• Coordinate with Technology teams to implement scalable, efficient, and automated cloud infrastructure services.

• Assist in building, delivering, and sustaining of reusable data science products.
• Assist the delivery teams in integrating AIS products.
• Assist in managing DDSI's cloud-based data science workbench.
• Lead, mentor and assist junior colleagues.
• Be available to provide ad hoc support for other projects in a matrix organization.

Preferred Experience:

• 5+ years in software design and development in full-stack web development
• Competence in computing languages, frameworks, tools and methodologies:

• 3+ years of Python (and related topics, e.g., object-oriented programming, and data structures)
• 3+ years of development in Django, ReactJS, Streamlit, RShiny, HTML, JavaScript, CSS
• 3+ years of data processing using SQL, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Databricks
• Experience using AWS services (i.e., S3, parameter and secret stores, Lambda, Fargate, EC2s, etc.)

• Ability to work independently with little guidance on methodologies and design approaches based on sound business acumen
• Ability to work on multiple projects concurrently
• Competence in collaborating with experts in other disciplines namely data science and data engineering
• Competence in providing peer leadership to junior colleagues
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

How to Stand Out:

• Proficient in AWS web application architecture
• Proficient in ReactJS, Python, and Django
• Experience leading UX/UI design
• Experience developing user scenarios, business requirements, mockups, and technical specifications.
• Experience with analytic and orchestration tools like Databricks, Airflow, or similar
• Experience evaluating, choosing, and rolling out team software tools and component libraries
• Master's degree in a technical field or equivalent