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 passionate about providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers worldwide, powered by exceptional technology. This 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 Content Distribution & Origin Team

We are caching infrastructure professionals who develop scalable caching solutions. We are responsible for the development and operational efficiency of Disney’s owned and operated Origin, Midtier, and Edge appliances, which serve content for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. The Media Processing & Distribution group is hiring a talented Senior Software Engineer to support the growing Content Distribution & Origin (CDO) Engineering team. The CDO team within Disney’s Media Engineering organization is responsible for the development, support, and management of the content delivery pipeline from the origin to the end user.

Responsibilities

● Design and implement caching software for the delivery of streaming media and API responses.

● Optimize caching performance through scale testing and system hardware/software design

● Employ the Software Development Lifecycle to gather requirements, gain consensus on design, create robust implementations, and validate through automated testing.

● Create and manage mechanisms to collect metrics and synthesize meaningful insights with that data.

● Follow best practices to write documentation, tests, and code.

● Participate in peer reviews of code and design documentation both as author and reviewer.

● Cooperatively work within our organization during product upgrade and maintenance tasks.

● Support production deployments through troubleshooting, tuning, automation, and reliability engineering.

Basic Qualifications

● 5+ years of development, systems reliability, or performance optimization experience.

● Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a closely related field

● Systems programming experience in C or C++.

● Fluency in scaling HTTP, caching and networking protocols.

● A strong foundation in streaming video and content distribution.

● Proven experience building highly performant, stable systems.

● Skilled at writing unit tests and building automated tests

● Familiarity with metrics and observability tools such as Influx, Clickhouse or Grafana

Preferred Qualifications

● Prior experience with Varnish Cache/VCL or other HTTP caches.

● Expertise in Linux networking internals and/or storage subsystem.

● Python/Java/Go experience is useful.

● Solid troubleshooting and debugging skills.

● Familiarity with server hardware and the impact on performance of server architectures

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.