Senior Software Engineer - Platform Engineering

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

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.

The Commerce, Growth & Identity (CGI) team is dedicated to three business-critical areas at Disney that will help transform its media business. They create seamless user experiences for consumers who can choose from a wide range of subscription plans, enabling more choice and flexibility. The CGI team is also focused on building innovative and cutting-edge capabilities that will drive subscriptions, engagement, and monetization across Disney’s streaming and digital products.

Job Summary:

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering squad, you will be helping identify and resolve issues that broadly increase engineering excellence throughout the organization: driving impact to availability, scalability, resiliency, and architectural simplicity. We make fast, safe changes with measurable value across all teams in Growth, Commerce, & Identity. While other teams own and operate the platforms, we focus on ensuring their proper utilization and providing strategic direction for their evolution., working in partnership with our peers across Product, Project Management and Engineering.

 

You will contribute to and be part of an engaging, dynamic and inclusive engineering organization, grounded in scrum and agile practices, CI/CD, great collaboration, delivering solutions grounded in quality and motivated by a commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

Our teams values:

 Curiosity & Growth: We lead with curiosity, embracing challenges as opportunities to expand our knowledge and drive innovation.

Empathy & Human Connection: We prioritize empathy, humor, and authentic connection because great work begins with understanding and building trust.

Collaboration & Support: We know not all problems can be solved alone. We act as a team, lift each other up, and celebrate one another's success as our own.

Service-Oriented Leadership: We believe in leadership through service, mentorship, and daily acts of guidance that help our colleagues and ourselves grow.

Impact & Purpose: We measure our success by the value we create for the organization. We work with purpose, connecting our craft to outcomes that matter most.

Courage & Resilience: We approach hard problems together with courage and resilience, finding creative solutions and building systems - and people - that last.

Craft & Responsibility: We value clean, scalable, and reliable solutions. We take ownership, act with context, and earn trust through transparency and accountability.

Joy in the Journey: We believe casual connections, shared moments (and yes, coffee) bring joy into our work and strengthen our team.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the design, development, testing, deployment, and support of stateful microservices and lambdas in a multi-region cloud environment.

• Work with modern platform technologies like Istio, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, Terraform, and AWS.

• Use Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban to plan day-to-day activities and drive continuous improvement over time.

• Mentor engineers within your squad (and beyond!) to help them improve their technical ability and build their profile within and outside of the organization.

• Collaborate with your squad, Product Managers, Designers, QA, Operations, and other stakeholders to understand requirements and articulate technical decisions and outcomes.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

• Minimum of 5 years related work experience.

• Familiarity with at least one of the following Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages: Java, Scala, or Kotlin.

• Familiarity with at least one of the following cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Compute (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.

• A willingness to learn and experiment with new technologies.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Practical working experience with Istio

• Familiarity with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, and infrastructure as code (IaC) best practices.

• Familiarity with both object oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming (FP) best practices.

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA is $141,900 to $190,300 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.