Lead, Software Engineer

BUILD SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF 

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.  

How you will contribute to our magical experience?: 

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. 

This team is responsible for building out the tools used by our operator teams to provide quality control (QC) to highly visible live and video-on-demand media workflows, implementing playback features, and ensuring seamless integration to operator tooling so that operators are able to ensure the highest quality experience possible for our customers. 

The Lead, Software Engineer will be responsible for: 

• Implement new developmental features on our purposely built player to support the evolved A/V QC ecosystem. 
• Maintain our QC player stack that are used on a daily basis by our operator team
• Collaborative API design with peer teams on the back-end as well as front-end teams which depend on our libraries.
• Unblock issues that are blocking the testing and release of VOD content to our customers.  
• Maintain a strong understanding of our code to identify, research and address issues.
• Collaborate with application development teams, services engineering teams and product management to help understand and explain device limitations and requirements.
• Lead in strategies to ensure the quality and stability of our deployments, including testing strategies and telemetry approaches.
• Develop our project’s build system and continuous integration system as needed.
• Provide technical expertise or mentoring to developers on our team.
• Hold our team accountable to high development standards.
• Provide on-call rotational support as needed.

What we need from you to be part of this story:

• 5+ years of experience building production-grade playback systems across platforms.
• Deep knowledge of media streaming formats (HLS, CMAF, MPEG-DASH).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or  Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Advanced level of English.
• Experience with subtitle formats (WebVTT, TTML) and rendering pipeline.
• Experience with Swift, AVFoundation, FairPlay integration, Kotlin/Java, ExoPlayer, Widevine DRM, BrightScript, SceneGraph, Roku SDK best practices.
• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and threading/concurrency.
• Understanding of source control concepts and systems, CI/CD pipelines and exposure to GitHub.
• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins and Docker.
• Experience with messaging technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, etc.).
• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and threading/concurrency.
• Desire to work in a start-up, fast-growth, or rapid-change environment.
• Problem-solving skills to identify the root cause.
• Experience integrating media players into web applications.
• Solid understanding of web accessibility fundamentals.
• Experience in Streaming technologies, such as:  DRM technologies, adaptive Bitrate Streaming Algorithms, caption and subtitle formats such as CEA-608 / 708,SRT, TTML & Codecs AVC, HEVC, AV1, AAC, EAC3. (Is a plus).

Additional Information: 

At Disney, we believe it takes great people to create the memorable experiences, products and services our consumers know and love. We are a team of storytellers and hire under equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender identity. We foster a corporate culture of belonging and inclusiveness, which empowers our staff and company to thrive. At Disney, everyone has the opportunity to speak up and participate, grow and share ideas.

“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” Walt Disney