Lead Software Engineer

Department/Group Overview:

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:

1. 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.

2. 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. 

3. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Content Platforms & Operations is responsible for the development and ongoing advancement of the technical and operational functions driving the worldwide distribution and monetization of Disney’s linear networks and theatrical content. This includes Disney’s media supply chain and storage, network and theatrical distribution operations, media localization, network transmission and origination, and more. The global team also plays a critical role as the primary collaboration point for Product & Technology with Disney’s EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regional business teams.

Job Summary:

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join our Content Platform Engineering team, responsible for building and operating content inspection pipelines that enable intelligent analysis of media assets at scale.

In this role, you will lead the development of systems that apply computer vision and vision language models (VLMs) to video and image content, extracting fine‑grained temporal metadata such as scene boundaries, visual events, object presence, and contextual signals over time. These pipelines power automated inspection, validation, and enrichment workflows that improve content quality, operational efficiency, and downstream media discovery across Disney’s global content ecosystem. You will influence architectural direction for these pipelines, partner closely with platform and domain teams, and ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and production ready.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Technical Execution and Problem Solving: Lead execution across complex and ambiguous problem spaces by translating product and business requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Write and Maintain Software Solutions: Design, write, test, and deploy high quality code to develop reliable, maintainable software solutions.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with platform engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to align on technical approaches and ensure solutions effectively support business goals.
• Production Support: Provide production support through issue investigation, on‑call participation, and remediation of defects to ensure stable and reliable system operation.
• Engineering Quality and Best Practices: Raise engineering quality by mentoring peers and promoting strong practices in design reviews, code reviews, testing, and documentation

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years relevant industry experience
• Strong Proficiency in at least one core programming language (e.g., Java, Python)
• Experience designing and building distributed systems and APIs (REST and/or GraphQL)
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native system design
• Proven ability to understand product requirements and business needs and translate them into effective, scalable technical solutions
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies in production environments
• Expertise with full lifecycle of application development, including best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc
• Experience with a wide range of data store technologies such as MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and DynamoDB
• Experience in Agile/Scrum methodology
• Team player with strong oral and written communications skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or supporting computer vision based systems that analyze video content in production environments.
• Experience building visual search systems for video, including generating time aligned metadata, indexing it for retrieval, and supporting deep links to relevant moments within an asset.
• Experience with prompt engineering and interacting with LLMS
• Previous work experience in media or entertainment technology, particularly in content distribution and media supply chain.

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA and Bristol, CT is $155,700 - $208,700 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.