Lead Software Engineer

Department/Group Overview

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, working across the Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people worldwide.

Responsible for the development and ongoing advancement of the technical and operational functions driving the worldwide distribution and monetization of Disney’s linear networks and theatrical content. Includes Disney’s media supply chain and storage, network and theatrical distribution operations, media localization, network transmission and origination, and more. The global team also plays a critical role as the primary collaboration point for Product & Technology with Disney’s EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regional business teams.

Lead Software Engineer to join our Content Platform Engineering team, responsible for building and operating content inspection pipelines that enable intelligent analysis of media assets d the development of systems applying computer vision and vision language models (VLMs) to video and image content, extracting fine‑grained temporal metadata such as scene boundaries, visual events, object presence, and contextual signals over time. These pipelines power automated inspection, validation, and enrichment workflows that improve content quality, operational efficiency, and downstream media discovery across Disney’s global content ecosystem.

• Technical execution and problem solving: lead execution across complex and ambiguous problem spaces by translating product and business requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Write and maintain software solutions: design, write, test, and deploy high quality code to develop reliable, maintainable software solutions.
• Cross‑functional collaboration: partner with platform engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to align on technical approaches and ensure solutions effectively support business goals.
• Production support: provide production support through issue investigation, on‑call participation, and remediation of defects to ensure stable and reliable system operation.
• Engineering quality and best practices: raise engineering quality by mentoring peers and promoting strong practices in design reviews, code reviews, testing, and documentation.

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years relevant industry experience
• Strong proficiency in at least one core programming language (e.g., Java, Python)
• Experience designing and building distributed systems and APIs (REST and/or Graph
  
  QL)
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud‑native system design
• Proven ability to understand product requirements and business needs and translate them into effective, scalable technical solutions
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies in production environments
• Expertise with full lifecycle of application development, including unit testing, code reviews, documentation, and best practices
• Experience with a wide range of data store technologies such as Mongo
  
  DB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and DynamoDB
• Experience in Agile/Scrum methodology
• Team player with strong oral and written communication skills

• Experience building or supporting computer vision based systems that analyze video content in production environments.
• Experience building visual search systems for video, including generating time‑aligned metadata, indexing it for retrieval, and supporting deep links to relevant moments within an asset.
• Experience with prompt engineering and interacting with LLMS.
• Previous work experience in media or entertainment technology, particularly in content distribution and media supply chain.

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

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA and Bristol, CT is $155,700 - $208,700 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and may also 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 other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.