Lead/Senior Software Engineer – User Foundations Platform

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN (DE&E) Technology:

Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

User Foundations Role Description

The User Foundations team builds critical User Capabilities that are shared across all experiences on the streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ etc. We implement reliable, high-throughput services and pipelines for gathering information about our users and delivering personalized experiences. We're a fast- paced, dynamic, collaborative and fun team, and are looking for someone who can slot right in and start delivering from day 1. Few of our high scale platforms to name are ‘experimentation’, ‘audience segmentation’, ‘messaging’, ‘event streaming’, ‘User state management’ etc. You will experience work on high concurrent systems that let the Disney magic unfold to our customers worldwide.

We are looking for a Senior/Lead Software Engineer to build high-scale, data-driven platforms powering user experiences and real-time systems.

This role is ideal for engineers who:

· Enjoy building scalable backend systems, and/or

· Thrive in creating end-to-end full-stack applications

You will work across APIs, data pipelines, and user-facing applications, contributing to systems that operate at massive scale.

Why This Role

· Work on platforms used at massive scale

· Solve complex distributed system challenges

· Opportunity to work backend, frontend, or both

· High ownership and impact

What You’ll Work On

· Build and scale high-throughput backend services and APIs

· Develop data-intensive applications and dashboards (for full-stack engineers)

· Design systems for real-time event streaming and user state management

· Work on experimentation, segmentation, and personalization platforms

· Improve system performance, observability, and reliability

Core Responsibilities

· Design and develop scalable, distributed systems

· Build clean, maintainable, and testable code across backend and/or frontend

· Collaborate with product, data, and platform teams

· Drive engineering best practices (CI/CD, testing, code quality)

· Troubleshoot production issues and improve system reliability

· Mentor engineers and contribute to technical direction

What We're Looking For (Core Skills)

· 5+ years in software engineering (backend or full-stack)

· Strong fundamentals in:

• Data structures & algorithms

• System design

· Experience building:

• Backend services (Java / Node / Python / Go)

• OR modern frontend apps (React / TypeScript / similar)

· Experience with:

• APIs (REST/GraphQL)

• Databases (SQL/NoSQL)

• Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

· Familiarity with CI/CD and version control

Backend Depth (Preferred)

· Experience with Java, Spring Boot, Kafka

· Distributed systems & event-driven architecture

· High-scale data processing systems

Full-stack Depth (Preferred)

· Experience with React, TypeScript, state management

· Building data-heavy UIs / dashboards

· Strong understanding of API integration & UX

Nice to Have

· Experience with observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, etc.)

· Kubernetes / Terraform / cloud infra

· Experience with real-time systems

· Exposure to AI-assisted development tools

Required Education

· Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

· 5+ years experience