Senior Media Performance Engineer, Quality

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.

Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform - providing the best possible playback experience to our viewers. Media Engineering handles audio, video, & metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build and coordinate logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

The Media Experience, Performance Engineering - Quality Team is nested at the intersection of technology and innovation within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET). The team’s mission is to surface, investigate, and report playback anomalies and regressions across in-field performance data of TWDC’s streaming platforms. This work directly supports the company priority to enhance consumer experience by ensuring exceptional product quality.

As a Senior Media Performance Engineer within the Quality Team, you will help shape the future of media technology in a multidisciplinary environment spanning critical work streams. You will play a key role within the MXPE Quality Team to help drive improvements to playback Quality of Experience (QoE) across the OTT device ecosystem by identifying and troubleshooting issues with the greatest impact on subscribers. Using consolidated QoE frameworks, advanced tools, and data‑driven insights, you will document, ticket, and communicate findings to partner teams, enabling timely resolution through effective cross‑organizational collaboration.

You will help define and uphold standards for an ideal playback experience—high‑quality video and audio, fast start times, uninterrupted playback, and more. Through close collaboration with engineering, product, and player teams, you will accelerate innovation, contribute to research, and provide clear technical context to stakeholders, supporting alignment and delivering exceptional experiences to our subscribers.

Responsibilities:

• Analyze data to identify areas for improvement and change.
• Gather requirements and suggest solutions cross functionally as an integrator between business needs and technology implementation to solve for complex testing scenarios. Formulate plans with other engineers for future operational development.
• Perform hands-on device capabilities assessments and maintain product feature specifications per device platform; staying current with industry trends.
• Understand and track technical implementation and hardware constraints by maintaining documentation of test and analysis results across platforms.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Analytics, Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent major, and/or equivalent work experience
• Minimum of 5 years of substantial experience in streaming media, content distribution, or video technology
• Minimum of 3 years of proven expertise in Live Video Streaming Systems, including encoding, distribution, and playback.
• Comprehensive understanding of the live and VOD content delivery life cycle – “glass to glass”.
• In-depth knowledge of video compression, codec standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1), encoding bitrate ladders, and rate control.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to mentor junior team members in a distributed and cross functional team.
• Strong quantitative, analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and decision-making skills.
• Proficient interfacing with OTT and mobile devices (ex: Roku, Game Consoles, Apple TV, Android, iOS, etc.).
• Proficient use of data visualization and analytics tools (ex: Grafana, Datadog, Databricks, Looker, Conviva).
• Proficient in analyzing Quality of Experience (QoE) playback metrics and end‑to‑end performance indicators.
• Experience in designing and maintaining a matrix of complex documentation.
• Experience with ticketing and tracking systems like JIRA and Confluence.
• Understanding of CDNs and their relation to network operations, transit, and peering.
• Expertise in working with third-party services and device manufacturers.
• Ability to conduct independent research.
• Strong working knowledge in advanced data structures (SQL, NoSQL).
• Knowledge of video streaming quality metrics and technical aspects affecting the viewer experience.
• Ability to identify and resolve performance issues, optimizing end-user experience.
• Hands-on experience with tooling used to analyze subscriber data, trends, and performance metrics.
• Analytical self-starter with a proven ability to deliver results in ambiguous environments while effectively multi-tasking and re-prioritizing as business needs evolve. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in designing and implementing distributed systems with a focus on microservice architecture.
• Background in technical project management.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position is $97,500 to $130,700 per year in Glendale, CA. 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.