VP Software Engineering

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.

Job Summary

The Vice President, Software Engineering for Addressable Advertising will lead the end‑to‑end engineering strategy, architecture, and execution of our addressable, programmatic, and personalized advertising platforms. This executive role oversees the full ad‑delivery technology stack including ad decisioning, insertion, measurement, optimization, and high‑scale delivery systems powering monetization across live and on‑demand streaming products. You will guide long‑term technology direction, lead and develop engineering organizations, and ensure resilient, scalable, high‑performance ad technology systems. Partnering closely with Product, Advertising Sales, Data Science, and third‑party ad‑tech providers, you will define and execute our strategy for next‑generation streaming monetization.
 

Responsibilities

• Establish and drive the long‑term engineering strategy for addressable advertising across all streaming brands.
• Lead, scale, and mentor high‑performing engineering teams responsible for ad‑delivery platforms.
• Develop the multi‑year technology roadmap for addressable advertising, aligned to business and monetization goals.
• Represent engineering in cross‑functional executive forums with Product, Data, Sales, Finance, and Operations.
• Drive technical standards, platform reliability, and engineering excellence across teams.
• Ensure on-time delivery of scalable systems capable of supporting global live and VOD traffic.
• Oversee incident, reliability, and performance management across ad‑delivery systems.
• Manage technical relationships with external ad-tech partners (SSPs, DSPs, verification vendors, identity providers).
• Build a culture of innovation, accountability, and engineering excellence.
• Attract, develop, and retain world-class engineering leaders and talent.
• Ensure alignment across engineering, product, and business organizations.

Basic Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering, with significant experience leading large-scale distributed systems.
• Expertise in advertising technology (ad decisioning, ad serving, streaming ad insertion, measurement, targeting).
• Demonstrated experience managing senior engineering leaders and multi-team organizations.
• Proven track record delivering highly scaled consumer or media systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Executive experience at a streaming, digital advertising, or media platform company.
• Experience with machine learning for targeting, optimization, or relevance systems.
• Experience tracking AI adoption and measuring productivity improvements while ensuring quality metrics do not degrade.
• Proven capability to lead cultural change by providing training on advanced prompting techniques (e.g., meta-prompting, chain-of-thought) to move teams from basic to expert AI usage.
• Experience building systems that provide AI with necessary context, such as repository structure, coding standards, and documentation to generate relevant, accurate code.
• Background in high-availability video streaming platforms.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; advanced degree preferred.

The hiring range for this position in California is $304,900 to $408,900 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may 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/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.