Lead Software Engineer @ The Walt Disney Company

Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+

As part of Disney Entertainment, ESPN, Product, and Technology, the Web Commerce, Growth, and Identity organization (Web CGI) had ownership of all the commerce and identity flows that happened on Web for all 3 of these popular streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+.

Web Transactional Team (TAB)

The TAB team was the team in charge of Transactions, Activations, and Billing, within the Web Commerce domain. This meant that at any point in any flow that happened on Web, where a transaction would happen, the TAB team was involved as owners and maintainers of the feature.

The Experience

As the Lead Software Engineer of the TAB team, I got to set direction and architectural guidance for the engineering development for these crucial commerce flows, and to drive unification of the company’s technology stack, thoroughly understanding the different projects architectures and actively teaching others about it, using design patterns and iterative solutions that scale for the future. I specialized in third party integrations and activation of third party sold subscriptions, and became subject matter expert of this area.

I worked closely with stakeholders in the Product, Design, Automation, and Partnerships domains, to ensure unified customer experiences. My role involved leading requirement assessments, project evaluation, and collaboration across other feature teams to ensure that the technical architecture was followed. I had to be able to identify project risks and to come up with ways to mitigate them, effectively handling change and uncertainty, staying calm and focused through it, and helping guide other team members through it. Understanding when to delegate, escalate, and make decisions, and helping my team members do the same, in alignment with organizational goals.

I had to thoroughly understand and own my team’s domain, frequently taking opportunities to share my knowledge in written and verbal form, and encouraging my team to do the same. Communicating effectively, clearly, and concisely on both technical and non-techical subjects.

Leadership was implied as part of this role’s expectation, which included:

• Reviewing projects critically and ensuring that the tasks were broken down and understood by the team.
• Setting project milestones with deadlines, and making sure that the team effectively delivers them.
• Ensured continuous integration and continous delivery at every level of execution of projects.
• Hold the team accountable for regressions, known issues, and incidents.
• Proficient at systematic debugging to diagnose any issue within the team’s domain, while documenting the process and actively teaching it to other members.
• Guided my team to tune and change our monitoring and alerting tools as needed, driving continous improvement.

Achievements

Unification

I lead the efforts of migrating the ESPN+ Commerce flows into the unified platform that powered Disney+ and Hulu. This enabled a number of new features for the ESPN+ streaming service, including the ability to sell and merchandise bundles, pause subscriptions, purchase add-ons, perform plan switches, redeem promotions, and activate third party sold subscriptions, among others.

And I finally cemented the dominance of the unified commerce platform by deprecating the legacy ESPN+ Commerce App in a definitive manner, with a smooth transition from the old system to the new. Proving that the unified technology stack not only added new features to the system, but it was also fully encompassing of all the legacy features. This was a big win for the technological direction that the organization was taking, helping reduce infrastructure costs, and strengthening the argument for the platform my team was building.

Partnerships

I helped launch the MAX partnership with Disney+ and Hulu, by setting the blueprints and guidelines to build the integration.

And I led the efforts for the integration with the Venu streaming service. I participated in several meetings with the Venu team where we tested the cross-companies integration of our streaming services with theirs, which included in-person meetings at their offices in Los Angeles to ensure that we were ready for launch. I got highly praised for the way I drove the sessions, which ended with zero issues. We were well on track to launch before the business decided to pull the plug on the project.

Mentorship

I was honored with the opportunity to mentor a team of exceptional engineers, having regular check-ins with them where we set actionable goals to track their growth, seeking opportunities to pair with them for learning. I proudly saw them achieve success, and was humbled to learn together with them as we faced technical and organizational challenges that helped us all grow.

Acting Manager

In an ever moving industry business needs change all the time, which demands the ability for teams and organizations to adapt to new work conditions quickly. As the Manager of TAB was needed to lead a different team to build unified capabilities for the Hulu streaming service, I stepped up to be Acting Manager for a time, which gave me the opportunity to carry some additional responsibilities:

• Evaluating new projects presented by the business and estimating the amount of work needed.
• Understand the urgency of projects, prioritizing the the work effectively and efficiently, and communicate it to the team.
• Ensure that the team commitments are realistic
• Plan the roadmap ahead for the next 6 months.
• Consider the engineering resources available with their strength and weaknesses, finding strategic opportunities for growth.
• Partner with stakeholders to break up features and requirements into iterative releases.
• Ensure that all projects and features launch in time.
• Establish good relationship with team members, and keeping them motivated.

Operational excellence

As the only Lead Software Engineer in the team, production incidents, though rare, were my highest priority to resolve.

One particularly difficult incident to resolve was a high priority issue specific to the Safari browser that affected 6% of users in niche, very difficult to reproduce conditions.

After 5 weeks of debugging, triaging, and testing different solutions, my team and I attributed the root cause to a unique setting of the Safari browser that affected the site’s implementation in an unexpected, and unintended way.

We were able to resolve the problem by introducing a workaround that considerably improved the usage of the flow, and we saw a global decline in calls to customer service caused by the issue.

Technology used

• A/B Testing
• AWS
• Accessibility (A11Y)
• Adobe Analytics
• Adobe Launch
• Agile
• Airtable
• Ajax
• CSS
• Confluence
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
• Curl
• Datadog
• Docker
• ES6
• ESlint
• Enzyme
• Experimentation
• Feature Flagging
• Fetch
• Figma
• Git
• Gitflow
• Github
• GraphQL
• HTTPie
• Husky
• IntelliJ Idea
• Internationalization (I18n)
• JSON
• JWT
• Jackson
• Java EE
• Javascript
• Jenkins
• Jest
• Jira
• Jotai
• Kubernetes
• LaunchDarkly
• Lighthouse
• Lombok
• Lucidchart
• Mariner
• Markdown
• Maven
• Microsoft Teams
• NPM
• NextJS
• Nginx
• NodeJS
• OSX
• Observability (O11y)
• PNPM
• PagerDuty
• Postman
• Prettier
• REST
• React Testing Library
• React
• Recaptcha
• Redis
• Redux Thunk
• Redux
• RegExp
• SCSS
• SOX Compliance
• Screen Reader
• Scrum
• Sequence Diagrams
• Server Side Rendering (SSR)
• Single Page Application (SPA)
• Slack
• Spinnaker
• Spring Boot
• Spring
• Stitches
• Storybook
• Swagger
• Tealium
• Typescript
• Webpack
• Zoom