Principal Software Engineer

About 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.

Why Work With Us?

• 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: 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.

About the Role

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 or Java 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.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Self-learner, independent, excellent problem-solving skills

Key skills/competency

• Backend Architecture
• RESTful Services
• Scala
• Java
• Asynchronous Programming
• High Availability Systems
• Cloud Providers (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• CI/CD
• Observability Tools
• AGILE/Scrum