Lead Software Engineer

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BUILD SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF 

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.  

How you will contribute to our magical experience?: 

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, and the engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

This team is responsible for building the tools used by our operator teams to perform quality control (QC) across highly visible live and video-on-demand media workflows, implementing playback features, and ensuring seamless integration with operator tooling. These solutions enable operators to efficiently monitor content and deliver the highest-quality experience to our customers.

The Lead Software Engineer will be responsible for:

• Own the architecture of our shared player library. The contract between our player internals and the Disney teams that consume it. You decide its API surface, its versioning strategy, and how it evolves without breaking consumers.
• Lead the layering work already in flight. Moving streaming-protocol concerns out of the player and behind a clean API.
• Design the hooks and data APIs that let consuming teams build their own control layouts, rather than shipping them our UI.
• Implement and maintain features on the QC player stack used daily by our operator teams.
• Establish the engineering standards for the team: test coverage, code and design review, and how we decide what belongs in which layer.
• Work directly with QC operators to turn observed pain into product-shaped requirements.
• Lead deployment quality and stability strategy, including testing approach and player telemetry/RUM.
• Provide technical expertise and mentoring to the engineers on the team, and raise the bar through review.
• Unblock issues that are blocking the testing and release of content to our customers.
• Provide on-call rotational support as needed.

What we need from you to be part of this story:

• 5+ years of experience building and delivering production-grade software applications.
• Advanced level of English.
• Hands-on coding. You will implement and debug in an unfamiliar codebase.
• Concrete system design. Handed an unfamiliar problem, you get down to the actual interfaces, interactions, and responsibilities.
• A track record of technical ownership as an engineer. You have set the direction of a system yourself and held that bar over time, through your own code and design review rather than by managing the people who did it.
• Communication and mentoring. You explain technical decisions clearly to engineers and to non-engineering partners, and you measurably level up the people around you.
• Strong React 18+ and TypeScript.
• Experience integrating media players into web applications.
• Solid grasp of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and concurrency.
• Experience designing or maintaining a library/package consumed by other teams (versioning, backward compatibility, breaking-change management).
• Source control, CI/CD pipelines, GitHub; comfort with containerized build and deploy tooling.
• Problem-solving skills to identify the root cause.

Additional Information: 

At Disney, we believe it takes great people to create the memorable experiences, products and services our consumers know and love. We are a team of storytellers and hire under equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender identity. We foster a corporate culture of belonging and inclusiveness, which empowers our staff and company to thrive. At Disney, everyone has the opportunity to speak up and participate, grow and share ideas.

“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” Walt Disney

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