Product Development Architect (Media Codec)

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & 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.

Join us at Media Engineering, a driving force where we fuel the magic of Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology. Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform, ensuring the best possible playback experience for our viewers. Our team handles audio, video, and metadata content from ingest through publish, including normalization, processing, and packaging.

We handle large volumes of data to understand viewer experience and deliver high quality and low-latency experiences. Our mission is to transform how media content is created and enriched—leveraging Generative AI and multimodal models to represent every video, artwork, and text asset with precision, depth, and context.

This enriched metadata powers discovery, personalization, compliance, and monetization across Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and beyond. Imagine leading the technical vision for AI-driven metadata systems that understand and describe the world’s most iconic stories in real time—surfacing the perfect game-winning moment in sports, automatically generating captions for accessibility, or powering next-level search and recommendations. We’re not just keeping pace with the streaming revolution—we’re shaping it.

This role falls within the Core Media Technology (CMT) team in DEEP&T’s Media Engineering organization. CMT is one of our Research and Advanced Development (RAD) teams whose focus is in the domain of video and audio processing that drives innovative enhancements into our video processing platform for live and on-demand video streaming delivery. Our work involves optimizing media processing, introducing new media codecs, developing quality and performance assessment frameworks and conducting innovative media research towards the development of future platform capabilities for the purposes of achieving velocity, scale, and efficiency through an optimized media platform as well as redefining storytelling through innovative media experiences.

What You’ll Do

● Contribute to the enhancement of our video processing platform that involves processing of live and on-demand video for OTT ABR streaming delivery.

○ Contribute to the developing video quality and performance assessment frameworks

○ Optimizing video processing and our ABR ladders across live and VOD use cases

○ Developing and/or Optimizing video pre/post processing functions

○ Investigating and potentially developing new approaches to video processes such as Content and Quality Adaptive Video Streaming

● Conduct innovative research and advanced development involving:

○ Applied ML/AI to media centric use cases for the purposes

■ Achieving velocity, scale, and efficiency through an optimized media platform

■ Redefine storytelling through innovative media experiences

○ Future algorithms for new video codecs

○ IP/Patent Development & Defense

What makes this role unique

● Global impact from India: You’ll be part of Disney India innovation hub and work with talented builders creating impact on customers across geography. You will lead platforms that power global products like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC—used by millions of people worldwide.

● Strong ownership: Disney India is a core engineering hub.

● Leadership development: Build and mentor engineers, shaping the future of Disney’s engineering leadership in India.

● Work-life harmony: Disney India values work-life harmony. We provide flexibility as part of work culture, including flexible workdays and hours.

● You will conduct multidisciplinary research and implementation in video technologies, including video processing, video encoding and video streaming.

● You will design and prototype video algorithms and software workflows that can improve the video quality, reduce bandwidth cost and optimize transcoding framework of Disney streaming pipeline.

● You will collaborate cross-functionally with teams such as studio, streaming backend, streaming delivery and client, to investigate and adopt the cutting-edge technologies and specifications into production.

● You will investigate and develop advanced computer vision algorithms and machine (deep) learning techniques to address the tasks such as media enhancement, understanding, analysis, compression, quality assessment and so on.

● You will have the opportunity to research next generation image and video coding, participate in multimedia standardizations such as MPEG and AOM, and connect with academic research groups and conferences.

Basic Qualifications

● Expertise in video coding standards such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, H.266/VVC,

AOM-AV1.

● In-depth understanding and experience with multimedia stack (e.g. video formats,

encoders/decoders, video playback/players), multimedia frameworks, and video

coding/processing methods.

● A proven track record of success and demonstrable experience in research or

advanced development in video coding / media processing or adjacent fields (video

quality, computer vision, computer graphics)

● Strong background in applying deep learning techniques to video tasks such as video

enhancement, video understanding and analysis.

Preferred Qualifications

● Knowledge and experience in C/C++

● Knowledge and experience with Python libraries such as pandas/numpy for data

analysis and matplotlib/plotly for visualization

● Applied knowledge of Media Metadata and processing (Timecode, Captions, Subtitles,

SCTE35)

● Applied knowledge of ABR processing and formats (HLS, DASH, CMAF, MPEG-2 TS and

fMP4)

● Media Frameworks, gStreamer / DirectShow / FFMPEG

● Experience deploying and optimizing AI/ML models and frameworks

● Experience with data visualization and analysis

● Experience with building web-apps/dashboards for data visualization

● Experience with working with Dockers

● Web service development, REST APIs, XML/JSON

● Release management, continuous integration, Git/GitHub

● High load, highly scalable and distributed applications

Required Education

Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field with 10+ years of Related Industry experience.