Lead Software Engineer - AI and Observability

Lead Software Engineer - AI and Observability

Job  
Location New York, New York, United States / Glendale, California, United States Business Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Date posted Aug. 21, 2026

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.

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.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming’s distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will design and build intelligent, AI driven systems that enhance the reliability and performance of Disney’s large scale streaming ecosystem. You will develop agentic systems, machine learning models, and real‑time pipelines that transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive insights.

In this role, these autonomous agents will reason over complex system behavior, identifying issues in real time and driving faster resolution across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. You will partner closely with engineering, product, and platform teams to embed this intelligence directly into operational workflows, improving system resilience and subscriber experience at scale.

You’ll also deliver high quality features end-to- end and contribute to system design and code reviews and begin owning components of production systems within a fast paced, AI native engineering environment.

• Architect, design, and implement production-grade, distributed systems that leverage real‑time telemetry signals and AI-driven anomaly detection to optimize the health, resilience, and reliability of the global streaming ecosystem.

• Define the architectural patterns and scaling strategies for agentic AI systems powered by modern foundation models (e.g., Claude, GPT-4) to enable automated reasoning and predictive modeling for real‑time system health and reliability

• Develop end‑to‑end data and decisioning pipelines that transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into actionable insights, automated detection, and root cause analysis

• Create and deploy scalable APIs and services that deliver predictive signals, explainability, and insights…