Sr Systems Reliability Engineer

Job Summary:

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

As Systems Reliability Engineers (SREs) embedded in Walt Disney Imagineering, we apply software engineering principles to ensure our systems are highly reliable and efficient. Our responsibilities include architecting resilient platforms, developing automation solutions for deployment and operations, implementing robust monitoring and alerting strategies, and driving incident response and root cause analysis. We deeply embed in engineering teams to continuously improve system performance and reliability.

The Senior Systems Reliability Engineer is responsible for ensuring the stability, scalability, and performance of mission-critical systems that support Disney’s innovative entertainment experiences. This role blends deep technical expertise with a passion for reliability, leveraging automation, monitoring, and incident management practices to enable Imagineering teams to deliver exceptional products and guest experiences. You will work collaboratively across engineering and operations to architect resilient solutions, champion best practices in reliability engineering, and drive continuous improvement of platforms and processes. As a senior technical leader, you will be a key contributor to making Disney’s technology vision a reality, ensuring that every system delivers magic with consistency and excellence.

Responsibilities of Role:

• Define, measure, and monitor service-level indicators/objectives (SLIs/SLOs) and manage error budgets for critical services.

• Participate in a rotating on-call schedule and manage incident response, including remediation and blameless postmortems.

• Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to define reliability requirements and ensure deliverables meet agreed standards.

• Identify and automate manual operational processes (“toil”) to improve system reliability and engineer productivity.

• 24x7 on-call operational support.
  

Must Haves (Years of Experience, languages, programs, tools, etc.):

• Minimum of 5 years of experience with relevant internet technologies and with implementing, administering, and supporting production websites and backend support systems.

• Understand how to install and configure operating systems, specifically with expertise in Linux and Windows Server.

• Software Development Continuous Integration (CI) knowledge in GitLab CI or similar

• Experience with Source Control Management systems (Git)

• Infrastructure as Code via Hashicorp Terraform or OpenTofu.

• Experience in AWS as well as good familiarity with Kubernetes.

• Recognized as a subject matter expert on at least one OS and proficient in multiple operating systems, including OS performance monitoring, setup, configuration, tuning, and troubleshooting.

• Understand internet technologies and network protocols, including TLS, basic load balancing configurations, security zones, REST and DNS.

• Able to implement existing base standards for new systems and/or applications with mentoring for all the following: Site monitoring and instrumentation, Application monitoring and instrumentation, System monitoring and instrumentation, Resiliency and performance

• Able to diagnose simple to complex system problems.

• Able to author tools and scripts to be used by others to automate repeatable production tasks in standard languages like Bash, Python, Go, and PowerShell.

• Advanced skills in at least one programming language such as Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, Go, Swift or C++ and able to build unit test suites for all software being developed.

• Experience supporting and/or developing backend tools or services

• Able to perform and provide in depth analysis on load test runs against a moderately complex system.

• Demonstrates exceptional troubleshooting methodology, including the ability to author and instruct new methodologies to the SRE team.

• Independently resolve moderately to highly complex system and application incidents.

• Able to identify and propose system and application fixes for performance bottlenecks.

• Able to evaluate new application requirements for capacity and run-time best practices.

• Able to evaluate new system and/or infrastructure solutions for technical feasibility against known requirements and standards.

• Effective at dealing with change: Able to transition in role or handle a significant modification to workflow or technology with minimal ramp-up time and with very little guidance.

Communication and Leadership Requirements

• Collaborate with engineering, product, and business teams to deliver reliable solutions.

• Excellent verbal and written communication to all levels in the organization.

• Serves as primary point of contact with Manager.

• Demonstrates curiosity and continuous learning and self-improvement.

• Ability to lead functional teams in systems integration and design including writing operational specs, architectural diagrams, test plans and requirements management.

• Ability to influence architectural decisions and advocate for best reliability practices.

• Communication of ideas and solutions in a clear and organized manner.

• Clear and effective presentations to groups of people.

• Effective project management and planning on large-scale projects (familiarity with agile/scrum and water-fall project management a plus).

• Ability to design and deliver training to other staff.

• Construction of concise and complete technical documentation.

• Mentoring of Jr. Staff on technical material.

• Viewed as a reliable technical resource for others.

• Detailed understanding of the goals and requirements of the business supported.

Nice To Haves (see above):

• Experience with distributed tracing, service mesh, or advanced observability tooling.

• Contributions to reliability-related open-source projects or technical communities.

• Experience with multiple public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Full stack web development experience.

• Experience with workflow engines such as Temporal.

• Experience supporting LLMs in cloud providers.

• Skills in Datadog monitoring and alerting and instrumentation with OpenTelemetry.

• Experience using Hashicorp Vault.

• Contributions to reliability-related open-source projects or technical communities.

• Contributions to reliability-related open-source projects or technical communities.• An employee at this level is an experienced professional with solid foundational skill/knowledge in a given functional field
  

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

The hiring range for this position in California is $141,900.00-$190,300.00 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.