Lead Software Engineer

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.

• 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: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, ABC News, and many more. These products and brands serve millions of people globally.
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex technical problems.

Lead Software Engineer – Content Platform Engineering

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. Influence architectural direction, partner with platform and domain teams, ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and production ready.

• 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 support business goals.
• Production Support: Provide production support through issue investigation, on‑call participation, and remediation of defects to ensure stable system operation.
• Engineering Quality and Best Practices: Mentor peers and promote strong practices in design reviews, code reviews, testing, and documentation.

• 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 best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.
• Experience with a wide range of data store technologies such as Mongo
  
  DB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and Dynamo
  
  DB.
• 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.
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