Senior 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.

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. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

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.

Product Engineering

• Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

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, and metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

Job Summary:

Disney's Media Engineering Native Player Platforms  team is seeking an experienced Software Engineer who is excited to build apps enjoyed by millions around the world. You will be building scalable, elegant solutions for all of Disney’s player on a number of platforms, including Android, PlayStation, Xbox, and more. Applications that stream video 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 Senior Software Engineer, Android 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. 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.

Responsibilities

• Develop an understanding of the DEEPT software stack and specifically the MediaX component
• Maintain and update the Android, Xbox, and other platform variants of the Disney Media Player
• Understand the internals of android and Xbox and how to debug and diagnose Device issues. 
• Collaborate with application development teams, services engineering teams and product management to help understand and explain device limitations and requirements
• Ensure that the latest audio and video standards like Dolby Vision, Dolby ATMOS, DTS:X, HDR10+, and more are delivered with full fidelity.
• Develop, Debug, Test and Benchmark various components in the software stack
• Perform online code reviews of pull requests
• Gather additional requirements and spec missing functionality required across various functional teams
• Create and update documentation across the entire software development lifecycle as needed
• Maintain a strong understanding of our code to identify, research and address issues
• Contribute to strategies that ensure the quality and stability of our deployments, including testing strategies and telemetry approaches
• Help to develop our project’s build system and continuous integration system as needed

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of production experience with Java/Kotlin and the Android SDK
• Proficiency with Reactive Programming and Dependency Injection
• Well-versed in different architectural patterns (MVI/MVVM or equivalent)
• Excellent communication skills who can collaborate well across teams
• You write phenomenal code, tests, and documentation
• Experience resolving production issues ideally on a large scale
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study and/or equivalent work experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Comfortable using common Android libraries such as Dagger 2 / Hilt, RxJava2, Groupie
• Familiarity with Android TV / Amazon Fire TV development
• Familiarity with Microsoft Media Foundation
• Experience with streaming video, codecs, and DRM
• Knowledgeable about maintaining a large modularized codebase
• Experience using performance evaluation tools such as Android Profile

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY and Seattle, WA is $145,400 to $195,000 per year and in San Francisco, CA is $152,100 to $203,900 per year based on a 40 hour work week. The amount of hours scheduled per week may vary based on business needs. 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.