Manager, Software Engineer - Media Engineering

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 Disney’s 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 maximize 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 for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s 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 execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Media Engineering is an innovative organization that is focused on providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers around the world, powered by exceptional technology. This strategic work requires streamlining and repurposing technology across different business and distribution channels – including streaming, linear, and theatrical – so that technology can ebb and flow across the needs of the business.

The Playback Quality Optimization team is responsible for improving the quality of experience of our users at multiple levels in our playback stack. The team owns and develops a key technology in our media player which is responsible for ABR, error handling, network switching, and other advanced client technologies. In addition, the team collaborates on developing new models and solutions for video quality of experience and quality of service on the server side by contributing to playback selection, cost optimization, and performance. This includes the design, experimentation, testing, and productionalization phases.

Responsibilities will include design and discovery of new projects, executional success, domain ownership, operational expertise, and career and people coaching. This position will manage programs in Rust, Typescript, and Python. In addition, due to the amount of experimentation involved, the ideal candidate should have a working knowledge of data analysis and experimental design.

Responsibilities

• Work with a team of engineers building software in a collaborative development process
• Become a domain expert and help the team understand product requirements, prioritization, and project sequencing.
• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting
• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions
• Author and provide feedback on technical proposals and root cause analyses
• Provide mentoring and advice for other engineers
• Establish engineering best practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence
• Contribute to the DSS technical community through presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of technical experience with at least 2 years of technical and engineering leadership experience
• Experience delivering applications in a production environment
• Experience with Rust, Typescript, or Javascript
• Experience with data analysis, ideally with Spark or a similar technology
• Understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, promises, async/await) and threading/concurrency
• Understanding of source control concepts and exposure to Git
• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins and Docker
• Experience with application monitoring software such as Grafana, Datadog, etc.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Self-learner, independent, excellent problem-solving skills
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent training or work experience