Lead Software Engineer at Disney

Job Posting Title:

Lead Software Engineer

Req ID:

10133218

Job Description:

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 User Foundations team builds critical User Capabilities that are shared across all experiences on the streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+. 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 one. 

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance platforms. To be successful in this role, you need effective communication and collaboration skills, a passion for learning and trying new things, and a strong foundational understanding of programming and computer science. As a member of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software. 

On a daily basis you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.
• A sense of ownership of the projects delivered by your team and department
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast paced environment
• An understanding of how to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health and to manage risk.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements to our services
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• Your unique view and experience

What You Will Do:

• Promote and support Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban by actively participating in regular ceremonies such as stand-up, retrospectives and sprint planning.
• Collaborate with your squad, Product Managers, Designers, QA, Operations, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and articulate technical decisions and outcomes.
• Work with a team of engineers to build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting
• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions; author and share feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses
• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects; eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel; provide mentoring and advice for other engineers
• Talk to business partners to understand and refine requirements
• Participate in the on-call rotation, supporting systems and services during production incidents
• Establish standards within the team to drive quality and excellence
• Participate in organization technical community through presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

What You Will Bring:

Basic Qualifications  

• 7+ years related experience crafting backend architectures and delivering backend applications in a production environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Understanding of message based distributed, scalable, and resilient systems
• Problem-solving skills to identify the root cause and implement the fix.
• Ability to be flexible, adapting to changing priorities
• Fluent in multiple programming languages and an expert in Java
• Experience transforming requirements into software design, documentation and software.
• Validated knowledge of operating large-scale high-availability backend services and JVM services
• Knowledge of AGILE/Scrum practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Self-learner, independent, excellent problem-solving skills

Preferred Qualifications  

• Desire to work in a start-up, fast-growth, or rapid-change environment
• SpringBoot and related Spring projects
• Non-relational database technologies e.g. DynamoDB
• Redis and/or MemCache
• Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis
• Terraform, Docker and Kubernetes
• distributed data processing frameworks such as Spark or Flink that can be used for various data processing tasks, including ETL
• Expert with at least one of: AWS, Azure, GCP
• Experience building, testing, and tuning distributed systems
• Familiarity with both object oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming (FP) best practices.
• Familiarity with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, and infrastructure as code (IaC) best practices.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $163,100 to $218,700 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.

Job Posting Segment:

Product Engineering

Job Posting Primary Business:

PE - Streaming Backend

Primary Job Posting Category:

Software Engineer

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Seattle, WA, USA

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Date Posted:

2025-10-28 Apply Now