Sr Software 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—working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business worldwide.

Media Engineering focuses on delivering the best possible video playback experience, imagery, and metadata to customers around the world, by streamlining and repurposing technology across streaming, linear, and theatrical channels. The Quality, Targeting, and Experience team develops automated feedback loops for Disney Streaming’s suite of services—including Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu—to provide the highest quality experience to consumers. Robust data pipelines are also built to calculate and report quality metrics for continuous improvement.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will collaborate with a varied group of data engineers, software engineers, researchers, data scientists, product managers, and more, while leading by example and mentoring junior developers.

• Work with a team building high-performance, stable, scalable software.
• Participate in the code review process by providing feedback on pull requests.
• Participate in the on‑call rotation, supporting systems and services during production incidents.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent work experience).
• 5+ years of experience designing and delivering backend architectures in production environments, with a strong understanding of design patterns and best practices.
• Experience building and maintaining data‑intensive applications, bridging the gap between services and data teams to align architectural design with implementation.
• Experience building RESTful and/or gRPC services to facilitate communication between distributed components.
• Proficient in at least one programming language:
  Scala, Java, Go, or Python.
• Familiar with AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes.
• Proficient in observability and data tools (Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, Databricks) to monitor system health, data pipeline integrity, and algorithmic performance.
• Self‑motivated, independent, and excellent at problem‑solving, with strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to mentor less experienced developers and lead cross‑functional initiatives.

• Experience designing and operating large‑scale, high‑availability distributed systems and JVM‑based applications.
• Knowledge of functional programming patterns and their application in data processing.
• Hands‑on experience with messaging technologies (e.g., Kinesis, SQS).
• Experience with stream processing frameworks like Flink or Spark.
• Familiarity with CDN technologies.
• Interest in video streaming and internet networking.

Hiring range: $148,700 to $199,400 per year (New York, NY).