Senior Media QoE Playback Engineer

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 builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform - providing the best possible playback experience to our viewers. Media Engineering handles audio, video, & metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build and coordinate logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

The Media Experience, Performance Engineering - Quality Team is nested at the intersection of technology and innovation within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET). The team’s mission is to surface, investigate, and report playback anomalies and regressions across in-field performance data of TWDC’s streaming platforms. This work directly supports the company priority to enhance consumer experience by ensuring exceptional product quality.

As a Senior Media Performance Engineer within the Quality Team, you will help shape the future of media technology in a multidisciplinary environment spanning critical work streams. You will play a key role within the MXPE Quality Team to help drive improvements to playback Quality of Experience (QoE) across the OTT device ecosystem by identifying and troubleshooting issues with the greatest impact on subscribers.

Using consolidated QoE frameworks, advanced tools, and data‑driven insights, you will document, ticket, and communicate findings to partner teams, enabling timely resolution through effective cross‑organizational collaboration.

You will help define and uphold standards for an ideal playback experience—high‑quality video and audio, fast start times, uninterrupted playback, and more. Through close collaboration with engineering, product, and player teams, you will accelerate innovation, contribute to research, and provide clear technical context to stakeholders, supporting alignment and delivering exceptional experiences to our subscribers.

Responsibilities

• Analyze data to identify areas for improvement and change.
• Gather requirements and suggest solutions cross functionally as an integrator between business needs and technology implementation to solve for complex testing scenarios. Formulate plans with other engineers for future operational development.
• Perform hands-on device capabilities assessments and maintain product feature specifications per device platform; staying current with industry trends.
• Understand and track technical implementation and hardware constraints by maintaining documentation of test and analysis results across…