Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally. 

Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Media Engineering is an innovative organization that is focused on providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers around the world, powered by exceptional technology. This strategic work requires streamlining and repurposing technology across different business and distribution channels – including streaming, linear, and theatrical – so that technology can ebb and flow across the needs of the business.

 

The Quality, Targeting, and Experience team develops automated feedback loops that drive how videos are delivered to customers for Disney Streaming’s suite of streaming services, including Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and more. We balance the needs of our business strategy with the demands of an evolving internet to provide the highest possible quality of experience directly to consumers in the form of pristine, error-free streaming media. We also develop robust data pipelines that calculate and report the quality of experience that our customers receive so that we can continually improve the way we deliver media.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a varied team of data engineers, other software engineers, researchers, data scientists, product managers and more, as well as to provide leadership by example to other developers on the team and in the organization.

Responsibilities

• Work with a team building high-performance, stable, scalable software

• Participate in the code review process by providing feedback on pull requests

• Participate in the on-call rotation, supporting systems and services during production incidents

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent work experience).

• 5+ years of experience designing and delivering backend architectures in a production environment, with a strong understanding of design patterns and best practices.

• Experienced in building and maintaining data-intensive applications, bridging the gap between services and data teams to align architectural design with implementation.

• Experience building RESTful and/or gRPC services to facilitate communication between distributed components.

• Proficient in at least one programming language: Scala, Java, Go, or Python.

• Familiar with AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes.

• Proficient in observability and data tools (Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, Databricks) to monitor system health, data pipeline integrity, and algorithmic performance.

• Self-motivated, independent, and excellent at problem-solving, with strong verbal and written communication skills.

• Ability to mentor less experienced developers and lead cross-functional initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and operating large-scale, high-availability distributed systems and JVM-based applications.

• Knowledge of functional programming patterns and their application in data processing.

• Hands-on experience with messaging technologies (e.g., Kinesis, SQS)

• Experience with stream processing frameworks like Flink or Spark

• Familiarity with CDN technologies.

• Interest in video streaming and internet networking.

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $148,700 to $199,400 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.