Principal Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

• Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Media Engineering

Media Engineering is an innovative organization that is focused on providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers around the world, powered by exceptional technology. This strategic work requires streamlining and re-purposing technology across different business and distribution channels – including streaming, linear, and theatrical – so that technology can ebb and flow across the needs of the business.

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join Playback Services within the Media Engineering organization. Our team’s mission is to build highly available, high throughput services that are essential to delivering high quality content to our subscribers. The team is responsible for the backend of media playback, facilitating media selection, device customization, and antipiracy technologies. If you enjoy streaming media, are interested in live sports and entertainment, or just want to join a fast-growing team that plays a critical role in the core functionality of our streaming products, then our team is for you!

Responsibilities

• Work with a team of engineers building software in a collaborative development process

• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects

• Collaborate with business partners to understand and refine requirements

• Eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel

• Ramp up quickly on existing software to deliver incremental, integrated solutions in a complex environment

• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting

• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions

• Participate in the code review process by assessing pull requests

• Support systems and services during production incidents as part of the on-call rotation

• Author and recommend technical proposals and root cause analyses

• Provide mentoring and advice for other specialists

• Establish engineering practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence

• Represent the DSS technical community at presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

Basic Qualifications

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

• 10+ years related experience crafting backend architectures and delivering backend applications in a production environment.

• Expertise in functional programming patterns and experience building RESTful services using Scala APIs; validated knowledge of operating large-scale high-availability backend services

• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and threading/concurrency

• Knowledge of source control systems, messaging and caching technologies, CI/CD pipelines, public cloud providers and observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring (Git, Jenkins, Docker, Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, DynamoDB, RDBMS, Redis, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Datadog, Splunk, Grafana)

• Knowledge of AGILE/Scrum practices.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $189,256 to $253,880 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $180,646 to $242,330; and the hiring range for this position in San Francisco, California is $197,866 to $265,430 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.