Senior Manager, Data Streaming Engineering

About This Role

This role is for a Senior Manager, Data Streaming Engineering to own the strategy, architecture, and delivery of real-time Guest Profile data for Disney Experiences. The individual will lead a team of data streaming engineers to build and operate event-driven pipelines and services, ensuring Guest data is fresh, accurate, secure, and privacy-first.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end strategy and roadmap for real-time Guest Profile data capabilities
• Lead the design and implementation of a modern, event-driven streaming architecture with strong SLAs/SLOs
• Define and enforce data contracts, schemas, and governance for Guest-related events and profile attributes
• Build and operate stateful streaming pipelines for identity resolution, account/device/household stitching, and profile graph updates
• Implement privacy-by-design into every streaming path for consent enforcement, data minimization, and secure handling of PII data
• Create real-time data products and services that power personalization, marketing activation, service recovery, and analytics
• Establish operational excellence including production readiness standards, incident response, on-call, and capacity planning
• Build, mentor, and grow a diverse, world-class engineering team, fostering engineering excellence and developing leaders
• Communicate strategy, trade-offs, and technical direction to executive and non-technical audiences
• Evaluate and introduce emerging capabilities to continuously improve speed, safety, and cost efficiency

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering
• 5+ years leading teams that build and operate real-time/streaming data systems in production
• Deep expertise in event streaming technologies and patterns (Kafka/Confluent/Pulsar/Kinesis/Pub/Sub, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, CDC frameworks)
• Experience with stream processing engines (Apache Flink, Spark Structured Streaming, Beam/Dataflow)
• Advanced knowledge in data architecture and lakehouse patterns (Parquet/Iceberg/Delta)
• Experience delivering automated, highly available ETL/ELT pipelines with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience across data warehouse platforms such as Snowflake and BigQuery, with expert-level knowledge in Snowflake and streaming integrations
• Proficiency with orchestration, testing, and data quality tools for streaming and batch (Airflow, dbt, Anomalo, Great Expectations, OpenLineage)
• Strong observability and reliability practices for data systems (metrics, tracing, logging, alerting)
• Hands-on programming experience in Java/Scala/Kotlin/Python for data pipeline and platform development
• Demonstrated expertise in data security and privacy (consent management, PII handling, tokenization, access controls, GDPR/CCPA compliance)
• Outstanding communication, storytelling, and stakeholder management skills
• Inclusive, collaborative leadership that develops geographically distributed, highly technical teams

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or a comparable field; or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering, including a minimum of 5+ years leading teams that build and operate real-time/streaming data systems in production.

Skills

* Required skills