Lead, Software Engineer

Lead, Software Engineer 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. BUILD SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF 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, working across the Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions worldwide. 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, including product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, and engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity. This team builds tools used by our operator teams to provide quality control (QC) to highly visible live and video‑on‑demand media workflows, implement playback features, and ensure seamless integration to operator tooling so operators can provide the highest quality experience to our customers. Responsibilities Implement new developmental features on our purposely built player to support the evolved A/V QC ecosystem. Maintain our QC player stack used daily by our operator team. Collaboratively design APIs with peer back‑end and front‑end teams that depend on our libraries. Unblock issues that are blocking the testing and release of VOD content to our customers. Maintain a deep understanding of our codebase to identify, research, and address issues. Collaborate with application development teams, services engineering teams, and product management to explain device limitations and requirements. Lead strategies to ensure the quality and stability of deployments, including testing strategies and telemetry approaches. Develop the project’s build system and continuous integration system as needed. Provide technical expertise and mentoring to development team members. Hold the team accountable to high development standards. Provide on‑call rotational support as needed. Qualifications 5+ years of experience building production‑grade playback systems across platforms. 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. Knowledge 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 such as Kafka, Kinesis, SQS. Desire to work in a start‑up, fast‑growth, or rapid‑change environment. Strong problem‑solving skills to identify root causes. Experience integrating media players into web applications. Solid understanding of web accessibility fundamentals. Experience in streaming technologies, e.g., DRM technologies, adaptive bitrate streaming algorithms, caption and subtitle formats such as CEA‑608/708, SRT, TTML, and codecs AVC, HEVC, AV1, AAC, EAC3 (a plus). Additional Information At Disney, we believe great people create the memorable experiences, products and services our consumers know and love. We hire under equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender identity. We foster a culture of belonging and inclusivity that empowers our staff to thrive. #J-18808-Ljbffr