Lead 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 – 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.

Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform - providing the best possible playback experience to our viewers. The team handles audio, video, and metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

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. We build platform agnostic tools to test video on a variety of devices including smart TVs, Chromecast, browser-based devices, Roku, iOS and Android platforms, Playstation, Xbox, and set top boxes.

Our team is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to help us deliver excellent streaming experiences for Hulu and Disney+ as a developer of our client player. Our team is responsible for playback across several devices including gaming consoles and set top boxes. You will have the opportunity to lead in the design and implementation of our cross-platform player that runs Disney+ and Hulu on these devices.

We’re looking for an experienced JavaScript, C/C++ or Rust engineer who has video player and cross platform development experience. You should have a passion for coding and debugging hard problems, and an eagerness to help us deliver seamless video to our subscribers.  As a lead engineer, you will get to own large features, lead the technical direction of our work, and mentor and provide technical expertise to other engineers. You will work closely with other technical teams in the application layer and backend video services to deliver features.

Responsibilities:

• Architect technical solutions for video player development and testing.

• Builds tools for testing video playback on JS based devices.

• Leads programming, testing and debugging of applications or fixes to existing applications.

• Interacts and coordinates deliverables with other technical groups in the organization.

• Conceives and sets the architectural direction for development projects.

• Rapidly prototype and implement scalable, reliable, and maintainable media applications using TypeScript, JavaScript, and other web development technologies.

• Leads team members in problem analysis and issue resolution.

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with proficiency in writing optimized JavaScript (ES5 &ES6) and TypeScript with a low memory footprint. 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

• The ability to jump into a project and contribute immediately to both architecture and implementation.

• Outstanding communication, collaboration skills, and a strong ethic of teamwork.

• API design experience (authoring and providing feedback) with stakeholders.

• Quality-first demeanor with a focus on test automation and CI/CD.

• Strong code design and architectural skill.

• Strong analytical skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with our common development tools such as: GitHub, Jenkins, Vite, AWS, Confluence, JIRA. 

• Leadership, the ability to identify problems and drive towards solutions, and an eagerness to learn and teach new technologies & solve novel problems. 

• Two to four years of project lead experience.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $159,500 to $213,900 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $152,200 to $204,100; and the hiring range for this position in North Carolina is $145,000 to $194,400 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.