Staff/Architect Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & 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.

Join us at Media Engineering, a driving force where we fuel the magic of Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology. Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform, ensuring the best possible playback experience for our viewers. Our team handles audio, video, and metadata content from ingest through publish, including normalization, processing, and packaging.

We handle large volumes of data to understand viewer experience and deliver high quality and low-latency experiences.

Our mission is to transform how media content is created and enriched—leveraging Generative AI and multimodal models to represent every video, artwork, and text asset with precision, depth, and context. This enriched metadata powers discovery, personalization, compliance, and monetization across Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and beyond.

Imagine leading the technical vision for AI-driven metadata systems that understand and describe the world’s most iconic stories in real time—surfacing the perfect game-winning moment in sports, automatically generating captions for accessibility, or powering next-level search and recommendations.

We’re not just keeping pace with the streaming revolution—we’re shaping it.

We’re looking for a dedicated Staff Software Engineer/Architects to guide the design, architecture, and delivery of high-scale AI-powered Media services. You will drive system evolution, mentor engineers, and work closely with ML, data, and product partners to deliver intelligent, low-latency solutions for live and on-demand content.

What You’ll Do

• Lead architecture and system design for scalable, low-latency Gen AI data systems, metadata extraction, enrichment, and publishing services.

• Collaborate with ML engineers and data scientists to integrate multimodal AI (video,image, text) into production APIs and content workflows.

• Design and implement services that provide curated data from the organization’s medallion-architecture data platform and return validated metadata to Source of Truth systems.

• Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans, articulating trade-offs and aligning stakeholders across engineering, product, and operations.

• Raise the engineering quality bar by driving best practices in code quality, design

patterns, testing, and operational excellence.

• Drive project success by collaborating with product owners to ensure timely, high-quality deliverables.

• Investigate and resolve any production issues from end user to service layer and work to prevent them.

• Assist in rapid prototyping of design concepts to prove and test ideas with end-users.

• Mentor and grow engineers on the team, fostering technical leadership and a culture of innovation.

• Act as a technical advocate in cross-team discussions to align AI strategy with

• platform and business needs.

What makes this role unique

• Global impact from India: You’ll be part of Disney India innovation hub and work with talented builders creating impact on customers across geography. You will lead platforms that power global products like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC—used by millions of people worldwide.

• Strong ownership: Disney India is a core engineering hub. Ad Platform leaders have complete ownership and autonomy of architecture, delivery, and people development.

• Leadership development: Build and mentor engineers, shaping the future of Disney’s engineering leadership in India.

• Work-life harmony: Disney India values work-life harmony. We provide flexibility as part of work culture, including flexible workdays and hours.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of 7 years of experience in application development or software engineering in a large enterprise environment using modern frameworks.

• Proven experience in architecting and deploying AI/ML-powered services on large-scale cloud infrastructure and platform engineering initiatives

• Proven ability to operate and make decisions in ambiguous, fast-paced environments with evolving business and technical priorities.

• Strong communication and partnership skills; demonstrated experience providing technical direction and influencing design decisions across teams.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading code/design reviews at scale.

• Expertise with AWS services (SageMaker, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS) and messaging technologies (Kafka, Kinesis).

• Strong experience with both relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, ElastiCache) databases.

• Proficiency in applying Agile, CI/CD, and continuous improvement practices across infrastructure, DevOps, and operations teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Media Streaming and Big Data platforms, with a strong understanding of data pipelines, and distributed system operations.

• Proven ability to work in complex cloud and data platform transformations, including large-scale service migrations and modernization of DevOps workflows.

• Experience defining and delivering long-term infrastructure and platform roadmaps aligned with business strategy.

• Demonstrated success in working with cross-functional teams within large, global, or matrixed organizations.

• Strong curiosity and alignment with Disney’s mission, with a passion for delivering innovative, resilient, and developer-friendly platforms.

Experience with:

• Modern software stacks include Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, Python, and Terraform, with GenAI experience preferred for forward-looking platform enablement.

• Deep expertise in cloud-native platforms across AWS and Azure, including Kubernetes AKS and EKS, as well as cloud storage solutions such as S3 and Azure Storage.

• Strong data architecture and modeling skills with proficiency in relational and NoSQL databases such as Aurora, Oracle, SQL Server, Redis, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch, and RavenDB.

• Hands-on experience with big data and streaming technologies including Spark, Flink, Airflow, Databricks, and Kafka for large-scale, high-throughput pipeline operations.

• Proficiency in observability and monitoring using Datadog, Splunk, and Grafana, with a track record of improving platform reliability, performance, and incident response.

• Strong foundation in object-oriented programming, API-driven architectures, and dependency injection to support scalable, maintainable, and secure codebases.

• Demonstrated success guiding platform-wide modernization, driving adoption of new technologies and scaling infrastructure to support mission-critical systems.

• Deep understanding of data governance, access controls, encryption, vulnerability management, and compliance best practices across multi-cloud environments.

• Skilled in unit testing and CI/CD practices using frameworks such as JUnit and NUnit and in applying continuous integration and delivery strategies across infrastructure and software engineering teams.

Required Education

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