Lead Product Software Engineer Full Time

Job Summary:

Department/Group Overview:

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.

Content Platforms & Operations is responsible for the development and ongoing advancement of the technical and operational functions driving the worldwide distribution and monetization of Disney’s linear networks and theatrical content. This includes Disney’s media supply chain and storage, network and theatrical distribution operations, media localization, network transmission and origination, and more. The global team also plays a critical role as the primary collaboration point for Product & Technology with Disney’s EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regional business teams.

Job Summary:

• This role is critical to advancing a more unified and scalable content acquisition and distribution pipeline across Media Services, Ordering & Fulfillment, and direct-to-consumer platforms. As Content Platforms continues to streamline workflows, this position will serve as a technical leader operating across team boundaries—designing integrations and delivering new product capabilities that enable modern media workflows and support growth in both DTC and transactional lines of business.
• We are looking for a strong individual contributor with deep technical expertise who can independently drive solutions from concept through delivery. The role requires ownership of release management practices, ensuring reliable and efficient delivery across services, while also leveraging AI to accelerate innovation in production systems and improve developer productivity.

Responsibilities And Duties Of The Role:

• Provide technical guidance and evangelize best practices.
• Maintain a deep understanding of our core media systems and how they interact with upstream and downstream dependencies.
• Contribute and review code, set standards, and work with engineers to ensure product and design specifications are met
• Responsible for fundamental platform performance, scalability, and resiliency
• Partner with stakeholders to refine requirements, and propose solutions to problems that span multiple teams
• Influence and contribute to department technical strategy and planning
• Provide mentoring to engineers on advanced technical issues
• Research, learn, and evangelize widespread adoption of new technologies and architecture patterns
• Lead cross-functional troubleshooting of complex issues as needed
• Strategic planning and vision focused on experimenting with and deploying new technologies
• Any other duties needed to help achieve Business Objectives

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• Proven expertise with architecture and delivery of high volume, cached, fault tolerant, multi-threaded scalable systems
• Deep understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, etc)
• Expertise designing APIs and building RESTful services
• Mastery in Java and experience with multiple opensource technologies like; Spring, Tomcat, Nginx, Elastic Search, MongoDB, GraphQL, etc
• Highly knowledgeable in cloud-based technologies such as AWS EC2, SQS, S3, Lambdas, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Cloudformation/Terraform, etc.
• Expertise with full lifecycle of application development, including best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.
• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins and Docker
• Motivated self-starter with the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies. Can effectively articulate complex ideas and influence others through well-reasoned explanations
• Enjoy working on a team setting with engineers of varying experience
• Strong communication skills and attention to detail
• 7+ years relevant industry experience

Required Education

• BS Computer Science or related technical discipline or its equivalent

The hiring range for this position in Bristol, CT is $155,700 – $208,700 per year. 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.