Lead Software Engineer, Ad Decisioning

Lead Software Engineer, Ad Decisioning

Apply Now Apply Later

Job :  
Location: Glendale, California, United States / Santa Monica, California, United States / San Francisco, California, United States Business: Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Date posted: Oct. 30, 2025

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry‑leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

As part of the Decisioning Fleet, you will help build UI tools that analyze what ads are competing for slots for ad breaks across Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, and others. You will directly contribute to optimizing ad qualification and selection to make sure viewers always see the right ad at the right time.

As a Lead Software Engineer (non‑manager), you will apply your deep technical knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, loosely coupled, encapsulated, and testable software.

Daily, you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.
• Demonstrated project ownership.
• System and API design, and implementation best practices to guide and mentor, for example, micro‑service encapsulation and loose coupling.
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast‑paced environment.
• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well‑defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements.
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• A deep understanding of Java and Front‑end languages, as well as the Software Development Lifecycle.

Responsibilities
:

• Holistic understanding of the team’s domain and serving as a point of contact for stakeholders.
• Leading by example, supporting peers, and striving to improve code and design towards more scalable, clean, and decoupled implementations.
• Facilitate discussions and drive resolution, making sure outcomes are clear and well‑communicated.
• Designing, implementing, and testing full‑stack solutions to various engineering problems in a high‑throughput, low‑latency microservices environment.
• Understanding and use of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.
• Reading and understanding product user stories, translating them into actionable tasks, and leading the team through their execution.
• Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors, and alerts.
• Available for On‑Call rotations based on the team’s…