Senior / Manager, Product Development Engineering

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.

Ad Platform Role Description

Ad Platform builds Disney’s industry-leading advertising technology, supporting sports, news, and entertainment content across all major media platforms. Our systems handle high-scale, high-throughput, revenue-critical workloads.

We are looking for Managers and Sr Managers in Software Engineering to lead The Walt Disney Company’s Ad Platform engineering teams in Bengaluru. These roles offer ownership, technical depth, and global visibility, working on AI-driven advertising platforms that operate at massive enterprise scale.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position, ideal for leaders who enjoy staying close to architecture, design, and code—while managing engineers and at times managers; and building strong engineering organizations. You’ll draw from deep and broad technical expertise to mentor engineers, complete hands-on technical work, and provide leadership on complex technical issues. You will play a key role in scaling platforms, modernizing cloud and data systems, and growing the next generation of engineering leadership in India. You’ll be a strong advocate of responsible usage of artificial intelligence to improve software quality and developer productivity.

What You’ll Do

• Hire and the lead team: Hire, lead and grow high-performing engineering teams in Bengaluru, including managers. Actively participate in mentoring talented engineers and managers. Assist in career development of members in and outside your team.

• Lead complex, high-impact projects: Act as a hands-on technical leader influencing architecture, design, and code quality.

• Improve productivity: Drive AI-driven and data-intensive platform development. Be a strong advocate of responsible usage of tools to improve quality and developer productivity.

• Embrace next-gen technology: Lead cloud modernization and platform evolution initiatives, while respecting and maintaining business continuity.

• Global collaboration & alignment: Serve as technical leader and partner with leaders across engineering, data, and operations worldwide; across time-zones; to align on requirements and priorities, ensuring infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, DBA, and Data Operations needs are consistently met for changes, releases, and incident response.

• Innovate for customers: Own delivery of mission-critical, revenue-generating systems which improve quality of software and enhance customer experience.

• Technical and operational excellence: Establish best practices in cloud-native architecture, CI/CD, DevOps, security, and reliability. Ensure environments and software deployments proactively patched, vulnerabilities remediated, and databases configured and backed up to prevent data loss.

• Security, compliance & resilience: Implement and enforce best practices for security, compliance, and disaster recovery, including IAM, encryption, logging, vulnerability management, code analysis, compliance automation, and DR failover testing.

• Reliability & scalability: Continuously monitor and improve system performance, availability, and cost efficiency, ensuring mission-critical, revenue-generating platforms are stable under high-scale, high-pressure conditions.

What makes this role unique

• Global impact from India: You’ll be part of Disney India innovation hub and work with talented builders creating impact on customers across geography. You will lead platforms that power global products like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC—used by millions of people worldwide.

• Strong ownership: Disney India is a core engineering hub. Ad Platform leaders have complete ownership and autonomy of architecture, delivery, and people development.

• Leadership development: Build and mentor senior engineers and managers, shaping the future of Disney’s engineering leadership in India.

• Work-life harmony: Disney India values work-life harmony. We provide flexibility as part of work culture, including flexible workdays and hours.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years of leadership experience managing high-performing technical teams. Some roles require direct management of managers leading globally distributed squads of 6–7+ engineers.

• Proven ability to operate and make decisions in ambiguous, fast-paced environments with evolving business and technical priorities.

• Strong communication and partnership skills; able to articulate vision, strategy, and technical concepts across engineering, data, and operations leaders.

• Demonstrated track record of recruiting, mentoring, and developing infrastructure and DevOps teams at global scale.

• Experience leading large-scale cloud infrastructure and platform engineering initiatives, including mission-critical, revenue-generating systems.

• Proficiency in applying Agile, CI/CD, and continuous improvement practices across infrastructure, DevOps, and operations teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Leadership experience in Ad Tech and Big Data platforms, with a strong understanding of ad serving, data pipelines, and distributed system operations.

• Proven ability to lead complex cloud and data platform transformations, including large-scale service migrations and modernization of DevOps workflows.

• Experience defining and delivering long-term infrastructure and platform roadmaps aligned with business strategy.

• Demonstrated success in cross-functional leadership within large, global, or matrixed organizations.

• Strong curiosity and alignment with Disney’s mission, with a passion for delivering innovative, resilient, and developer-friendly platforms.

Experience with:

• Modern software stacks including Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, Python, and Terraform, with GenAI experience preferred for forward-looking platform enablement.

• Deep expertise in cloud-native platforms across AWS and Azure, including Kubernetes AKS and EKS, as well as cloud storage solutions such as S3 and Azure Storage.

• Strong data architecture and modeling skills with proficiency in relational and NoSQL databases such as Aurora, Oracle, SQL Server, Redis, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch, and RavenDB.

• Hands-on experience with big data and streaming technologies including Spark, Flink, Airflow, Databricks, and Kafka for large-scale, high-throughput pipeline operations.

• Proficiency in observability and monitoring using Datadog, Splunk, and Grafana, with a track record of improving platform reliability, performance, and incident response.

• Strong foundation in object-oriented programming, API-driven architectures, and dependency injection to support scalable, maintainable, and secure codebases.

• Demonstrated success guiding platform-wide modernization, driving adoption of new technologies and scaling infrastructure to support mission-critical systems.

• Deep understanding of data governance, access controls, encryption, vulnerability management, and compliance best practices across multi-cloud environments.

• Skilled in unit testing and CI/CD practices using frameworks such as JUnit and NUnit and in applying continuous integration and delivery strategies across infrastructure and software engineering teams.

Required Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.