Department/Group Overview: Media Tooling

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:

1.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.

2.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. 

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

Job Summary:

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Software Engineer to join our Live and Linear Tooling team, focusing on the management of live and linear content across the Disney+, ESPN and Hulu spaces. The applications in this space are responsible for the ingestion of live and linear feed metadata from our upstream partners, managing linear schedules to ensure no gaps or overlaps between airings on a single channel, contract resolution for blackout or features such as replay/lookback, as well as tools for the management of airings, live events, and stream health and fallback logic.

You will be responsible for designing, building, and operating highly scalable systems that orchestrate the scheduling, rights, artwork and descriptive metadata for live and linear content. You will be working with a team to own the architecture and reliability of core services that power content availability, ensuring accurate alignment between programming schedules, distribution rights, and metadata across platforms and partners.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:  

• Write and Maintain Software Solutions: Design, write, test, and deploy high-quality code to develop reliable, maintainable software solutions.

• Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams: Work closely with software engineers, product managers, and program managers to ensure technical solutions effectively support business goals and content strategies. Foster a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.

• Production Support: Monitor and optimize production systems, ensuring platform stability, performance, and uptime.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training: (Minimum and Preferred. Inclusive of Licenses/Certs (include functional experience as well as behavioral attributes and/or leadership capabilities))

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years relevant industry experience

• Proficiency in at least one object oriented programming language (e.g., Java, Python)

• Solid understanding of software design principles, algorithms, and data structures.

• Expertise with full lifecycle of application development, including best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.

• Experience with a wide range of data store technologies such as Redis, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and DynamoDB

• Experience in Agile/Scrum methodology

• Team player with strong oral and written communication skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proficiency in Java

• Experience with high scale, high availability systems

• Deep AWS experience (Lambdas, Kinesis Streams)

• Kubernetes experience in production environments

• Observability tooling experience (e.g. Datadog)

• Experience breaking down ambiguous business requirements into technical designs

Experience with:

• Experience working with REST APIs for building and consuming services.

• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS and their core services (e.g., S3, Lambda, EC2).

• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)

• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Docker, Gitlab-CI, Terraform/Cloud formation, and Jenkins.

• Experience with frameworks such as Spring, Spring Boot

Required Education: 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

The hiring range for this position in New York City, NY and Seattle, WA is $148,700.00 to $199,400.00 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.