Software Engineer II

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:

• 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.

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

The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming’s distributed systems are reliable, performant, and designed to proactively prevent negative impact on our customers.

Our team translates complex operational and performance data into clear, actionable insights, informing investment and engineering decisions, and reinforcing a culture of accountability, learning, and operational excellence. By reducing unnecessary toil through automation and AI-enabled workflows, we will help accelerate developer productivity and demonstrate that stability is an accelerator to innovation.

 We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly.

Job Summary:

As a Software Engineer II, you will design, implement, and enhance observability solutions that deliver actionable insights across Disney’s large-scale streaming services. You will contribute to core telemetry features, build scalable data pipelines, collaborate with service teams, and help improve monitoring, reliability, and incident detection across the engineering ecosystem.

At the P2 level, you will develop, document, implement, and test features, break down work into prioritized tasks, participate in code reviews and design discussions, and begin owning aspects of systems within the team.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Key Build and Evolve Observability Tooling and Platforms

• Develop and enhance tools for metrics, logs, traces, event correlation, insights dashboards, and monitoring services used across all Disney Streaming service teams.
• Write clean, maintainable code that integrates existing observability frameworks while continually improving performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Implement features within telemetry ingestion pipelines and storage layers that support high-volume, low latency data processing.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and management using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools.

Improve System Visibility and Operational Insights

• Collaborate with service engineering teams to design and instrument consistent, high-quality telemetry that reflects system behavior, business events, and performance indicators.
• Build dashboards, automated reports, and insightful visualizations that help engineers detect anomalies early and understand root causes faster.
• Work with incident response partners to refine and automate alerting mechanisms to reduce noise while improving detection fidelity.

Participate in Architecture, Design, and Code Quality Processes

• Contribute to technical design documents for new observability features and improvements, ensuring alignment with architectural principles and long-term platform goals.
• Participate in peer code reviews, offering constructive feedback and learning from more senior engineers’ approaches.
• Help evaluate technical tradeoffs and propose improvements to existing observability patterns used across the organization.

Support Reliability, Incident Response, and Continuous Improvement

• Assist in improving service reliability by leveraging observability tools, helping to uncover gaps, improve instrumentation, and drive more effective system behaviors.
• Contribute to post-incident reviews by proposing durable changes to telemetry, alerting, or insights workflows according to our team’s best practices and standards.
• Identify opportunities to automate manual developer or SRE workflows, reducing toil and improving peer velocity.

Collaborate and Take Ownership Within the Team

• Break down incoming features into actionable engineering tasks with clear deliverables and timelines.
• Document changes, patterns, and best practices to improve clarity, maintainability, and onboarding for other engineers.
• Begin taking ownership of specific subsystems or components within the observability platform, with support from senior engineers.
• Support and mentor interns or early-career team members in areas where you have growing expertise.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering or equivalent training.
• Experience developing and testing features within existing codebases.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Java, Python, or Node.js.
• Experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and Kubernetes.
• Understanding observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, distributed tracing, alerting, SLIs/SLOs.
• Ability to break down features into tasks and communicate clearly about technical issues and decisions.
• Ability to participate in architecture discussions and contribute to code reviews.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modern observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, OpenSearch).
• Familiarity with building telemetry or real-time data pipelines.
• Experience participating in incident response or reliability engineering processes.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and New York, NY is $123,000 - $165,000 per year and in Glendale, CA is $117,500 - $157,500. 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.