Lead Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

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.

Disney's Android team is seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer who is excited to build apps enjoyed by millions around the world. You will be building scalable, elegant solutions for the Android applications on Disney+ and Star+ across a wide array of devices including phones, tablets, and TVs.

Our highly collaborative group works in tandem with many cross-functional teams. We value pristine communication skills, both written and verbal, as well as a bias for action. We are incredibly invested in maintaining high code quality standards with unit tests, automated tests, modern libraries, and a Kotlin codebase. We strive to build the best Live and video-on-demand (VOD) applications in the world, and we look forward to hearing more about your skills and how they can help us achieve this lofty goal.

As a Lead Android Engineer at Disney, you are ready and willing to be responsible for a wide array of technical aspects. You assist with critical components including our release process, remote configuration management, and live production issues. You have and will lead entire projects from start to finish. While familiar with the high-level aspects of our project as a whole, you are also focused on and monitoring the health of the team. You not only seek out leadership opportunities to improve processes, but you do it with finesse and a positive attitude. You are comfortable facilitating career growth amongst team members and are invested in the long-term success of the company.

What You Will Do
 

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of robust and scalable Android applications across various platforms including phones, tablets, and TVs.
• Own project delivery end-to-end, including architecture, implementation, testing, release, and post-release monitoring.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives in code quality, testing strategy, and system design.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to shape product vision and ensure alignment across the development lifecycle.
• Provide technical mentorship and coaching to engineers within the Android team, fostering a culture of collaboration, learning, and excellence.
• Monitor and troubleshoot production issues, working proactively to ensure high availability and performance of applications.
• Contribute to the planning and execution of release processes, remote configuration strategies, and live feature rollouts.
• Maintain deep awareness of system health, application performance, and customer impact through monitoring and diagnostics tools.
• Actively participate in design and code reviews, offering constructive feedback and upholding best practices.

• Represent the Android team in department-wide technical forums, retrospectives, and strategic planning sessions.
• Identify and drive opportunities for refactoring, performance improvements, and feature modularization.
• Contribute to shaping team goals, roadmaps, and technical strategy in alignment with broader business objectives.
• Stay informed about latest trends in Android development and apply modern practices to improve user experience and development efficiency.
• Assist with onboarding and support of new team members, sharing knowledge and documenting engineering workflows.
• Collaborate with DevOps and QA teams to enhance CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
• Partner with security and legal teams to ensure apps meet compliance and regulatory standards, especially for DRM and video streaming technologies.

Required Qualifications & Skills
 

Basic Qualifications 

• 7+ years of production experience with Kotlin and the Android SDK
• Proficiency with Reactive Programming and Dependency Injection
• Well-versed in different architectural patterns (MVI/MVVM or equivalent)
• Pristine communication skills to collaborate well across teams
• You write phenomenal code, tests, and documentation
• Experience resolving production issues ideally on a large scale
• Successfully lead a project from start to finish
• Experience coaching and mentoring colleagues
• Well-versed in common Android libraries (e.g: Dagger 2 / Hilt, RxJava2, Coroutines, Kotlin Flow, Jetpack Compose and other Jetpack libraries)
• Well-versed in Android CI/CD (Jenkins and Github Actions).
• A deep understanding of many aspects of the Android SDK such as Activity and Fragment lifecycles, thread management, custom views, animations and architectural patterns (View Architecture, Modularization)

Preferred Qualifications 

• Advanced Gradle understanding (Custom build tasks, convention plugins).
• App performance tooling experience (Benchmarking, Tracing, Threading, Perfetto, Android Profiler)
• Annotation processing (KAPT/KSP)
• Knowledgeable about maintaining a large modularized codebase
• Supporting multiple form factors (Mobile, Tablet, TV) and familiarity with Android TV / Amazon Fire TV development
• Experience with streaming video, codecs, and DRM

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree or better in Computer Science or a related technical field or equivalent job experience.

The Walt Disney Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We strive to be a diverse workforce that is representative of our audiences, and where all can thrive and belong. Disney is committed to forming a team that includes and respects a variety of voices, identities, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.