Staff/Architect Software Engineer

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 Platforms 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 hands-on Lead and Principal Software Engineers to innovate for The Walt Disney Company’s high performing Ad Platform engineering teams in Bengaluru. This role offers ownership, technical depth, global visibility, and opportunity to work on AI-driven advertising platforms that operate at massive enterprise scale.

These are hands-on technical leadership positions, ideal for engineers who enjoy staying close to architecture, design, and code while mentoring other members in the organization. These roles span across front-end, backend, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) domains. You will lead and participate in technical planning, design sessions, code reviews and driving high standards across the team. You will collaborate closely with product managers, developers, Quality Assurance(QA) engineers, and DevOps. You will help translate business requirements into elegant technical solutions. You will play a key role in scaling platforms, modernizing cloud and data systems, and growing the next generation of engineering leaders in India. You’ll be a strong advocate of responsible usage of artificial intelligence to improve software quality and developer productivity. You will play a key role in driving engineering excellence, implementing best practices, and ensuring that the solutions we build are robust, maintainable, and aligned with long-term business goals.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, design and code applications and services.

• Provide hands on engineering leadership across squads.

• Collaborate with other leads to design and architect cloud native and service-oriented UI, backend and machine learning applications.

• Drive project success by collaborating with product owners to ensure timely, high-quality deliverables.

• Collaborate with product managers on design standards, processes, and adoption.

• Mentor team members through peer reviews, technical guidance, and creating reference implementations, while defining engineering best practices.

• Foster collaboration to establish API contracts, maintain system standards, and influence best practices.

• Take ownership, self-sufficient, hands-on position on the team to lead and drive quality, maintain application stability.

• Champion quality engineering practices (linting, unit testing, integration testing, pipeline automation) to enable continuous deployment.

• Investigate and resolve any production issues from end user to service layer and work to prevent them.

• Assist in rapid prototyping of design concepts to prove and test ideas with end-users.

• Create and enhance documentation and SOPs for debugging production issues.

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 engineers, 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 7 years of experience in application development or software engineering in a large enterprise environment using modern frameworks.

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

• Strong communication and partnership skills; demonstrated experience providing technical direction and influencing design decisions across teams.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading code/design reviews at 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.

• Deep knowledge of DevOps tools (AWS or Azure, GitHub, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm) and observability practices.

Preferred Qualifications

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

• Proven ability to work in 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 working with cross-functional teams 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.