Lead Site Reliability Engineer

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Job Description:

The Lead Site Reliability Engineer is a seasoned subject matter expert who drives reliability, scalability, and performance for critical Disney Experiences platforms that power immersive guest interactions across theme parks, resorts, cruise, vacation, travel, retail, and consumer experiences. In this lead role, you will guide other engineers, set technical direction for complex systems, and ensure our digital and physical experiences remain highly available, secure, and resilient for guests around the world.

Responsibilities:

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you will serve as a skilled, experienced problem-solver and team player, acting as the "go-to" technical lead for assigned platforms and services across Disney Experiences. You will architect and evolve cloud-native and hybrid infrastructures, champion observability and DevOps practices, and mentor individual contributors to deliver reliable, secure, and cost‑effective solutions that support Disney's creative, customer-focused, and innovative guest experiences. This role matters because it safeguards the technology behind our stories, requiring deep technical expertise, strong collaboration, and the ability to explain complex concepts and influence diverse stakeholders.

• Architect, design, and build scalable, maintainable, and secure infrastructure and platforms, including cloud-native and container-based solutions, to support mission-critical commerce and guest-facing applications.
• Lead the evolution of DevOps and SRE practices by consulting on, designing, and supporting CI/CD pipelines, automating infrastructure and operations, and creating telemetry and observability for monitoring and incident response.
• Serve as the SRE subject matter expert and technical lead for assigned products and platforms, owning reliability strategies, defining SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, and driving continuous improvement in uptime and performance.
• Identify root causes of operational issues in large-scale distributed systems, lead major incident response, and deliver clear retrospectives and remediation plans that reduce future risk and operational toil.
• Develop, maintain, and enhance automation, scripts, and Infrastructure as Code to standardize deployments, improve reliability, and support complex, non-standard environments without relying solely on runbooks.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, security, and operations teams to plan capacity, monitoring, configuration, security, metrics, reporting, recovery, and migration strategies for new initiatives and events impacting supported platforms.
• Mentor, train, and guide other engineers by providing continuous coaching, feedback, and technical direction, holding self and others accountable to commitments and aligning team work with organizational goals.
• Plan and coordinate team efforts and platform-oriented projects with moderate complexity and risk, breaking down organizational goals into clear outcomes and negotiating solutions to complex reliability challenges.
• Apply FinOps and cost-optimization principles to cloud environments, implementing governance, tagging, rightsizing, and usage analysis to balance reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Champion a diverse, inclusive, team-oriented culture that encourages innovation, creative problem solving, and service-minded collaboration, ensuring every voice is heard and Disney values are experienced daily.

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum 7 years of related work experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Systems Engineering, or software development, with a focus on large-scale, distributed, and cloud-based systems.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• Extensive hands-on experience with cloud hosting services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and modern cloud architectures, including containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, AKS, and GKE.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef) and CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, AWS CodeBuild, or Azure DevOps.
• Fluency in core scripting and programming languages (e.g., Python, NodeJS, Golang, Bash, Perl, Ruby, Java) and strong UNIX/Linux administration, troubleshooting, and security skills.
• Applied expertise in observability and monitoring, including defining and implementing SLIs, SLOs, SLAs and using major APM and logging tools (e.g., AppDynamics, New Relic, ELK stack, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic).
• Strong knowledge of networking and distributed systems, including HTTP, TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, SSH, VPCs, gateways, firewalls, and microservices architectures.
• Experience with databases and data platforms such as MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, and data solutions like Snowflake or Tableau, including ELT processes for data-driven decision making.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects, evaluate new systems and infrastructure solutions for feasibility, and design reliable, scalable enterprise systems in agile environments.
• Outstanding troubleshooting methodology and communication skills, with the ability to explain difficult concepts, influence without direct authority, and mentor, train, and guide other engineers.
• Ability to plan and prioritize work aligned with organizational goals, collaborate effectively across teams, and hold self and others accountable to meet commitments.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leveraging AI and automation for predictive insights and continuous improvement in system reliability and operational efficiency.
• Expertise in cloud infrastructure design and dynamic development technologies using Java, NodeJS, Python, and relational databases in large-scale business environments.
• Background operating production container environments and multi-origin hybrid (cloud and on-premise) architectures.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline.

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