Lead Media Performance Engineer, Quality

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming our media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to enhance flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform providing the best possible playback experience to our viewers. Media Engineering handles audio, video, & metadata content from ingest through publish for normalization, processing, and packaging supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build and coordinate logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

The Media Experience, Performance Engineering Quality Team is nested at the intersection of technology and innovation within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET).

Responsibilities

As a Lead Media Performance Engineer within the Quality Team, you will be at the forefront of shaping the future of media technology by diving into a multidisciplinary environment that spans crucial work streams. You will play a pivotal role in leading a team involved in device lab architecture and advancing ease-of-access tooling for audio and video technologies and services. You will contribute significantly to the seamless integration across all OTT devices, dive into cutting-edge research, leverage your commitment to continuous learning for breakthroughs that redefine industry norms, collaborate and build relationships seamlessly across organizations to foster an interconnected ecosystem, and accelerate innovation while providing clear context to all stakeholders.

Every single day is different! On any one day you might:

• Lead brainstorming sessions about simulation, forecasting, and optimization.

• Gather requirements and suggest solutions cross functionally as an integrator between business needs and technology implementation to solve for complex testing scenarios.

• A subject matter expert, performing hands-on device capabilities assessments and maintaining product feature specifications per device platform; staying current with industry trends.

• Understand and track technical implementation and hardware constraints by maintaining documentation of test and analysis results across platforms.

• Responsible for managing and maintaining project and work backlog; able to re-prioritize tasks as the business deems appropriate.

• Build cross-departmental strategies to refine the next productivity boost.

• Develop analytics to identify areas for improvement and change.

• Formulate plans with other engineers for future operational development.

• Present directly to leadership to influence change.

• Research and benchmark topics relevant to your project scope.

• Mentor team members, so they can own their projects and contribute in a significant way.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in electrical engineering, computer science, information technology, or equivalent major, and/or equivalent work experience.

• 7+ years of substantial experience in streaming media, content distribution, or video technology.

• 5+ years of proven expertise in Live Video Streaming Systems, including encoding, distribution, and playback.

• Comprehensive understanding of the live and VOD content delivery life cycle – “glass to glass”.

• Experience in designing and implementing distributed systems with a focus on microservice architecture.

• Proven success in a high-availability, large-scale production environment on AWS or another public cloud.

• Strong understanding of video compression, codec standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1), and encoding bitrate ladders.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to mentor junior team members in a distributed and cross functional team.

• Strong quantitative, analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and decision-making skills.

• Proficient interfacing with OTT and mobile devices (Roku, Game Consoles, Apple TV, Android, iOS, etc.).

• Familiarity with network-level tools; for example: ThousandEyes, Kentik, Catchpoint.

• Expert use of data visualization tools; Grafana, Datadog, Kibana, Splunk.

• Understanding of CDNs and their relation to network operations, transit, and peering.

• Experience in designing and maintaining a matrix of complex documentation.

• Proficient in build, upgrading, and maintaining a test lab or CI/CD environment.

• Experience with ticketing and tracking systems like JIRA and Confluence.

• Expertise in working with third-party services and device manufacturers.

• Background in technical project management.

• Ability to conduct independent research.

• Analytical self-starter mindset.

• Strong working knowledge in advanced data structures (SQL, NoSQL).

• Consistent track record of delivering results through ambiguity.

• Knowledge of video streaming quality metrics and technical aspects affecting the viewer experience.

• Ability to identify and resolve performance issues, optimizing end-user experience.

• Hands-on experience with tooling used to analyze subscriber data, trends, and performance metrics.

Preferred Qualifications

• In-depth knowledge of video compression, codec standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1), encoding bitrate ladders, and rate control.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $120,300.00 to $161,300.00 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $114,900.00 to 154,100.00; and the hiring range for this position in San Francisco, California is $125,800.00 to $168,700.00 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.