Software Engineer II - Streaming Data Platform

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 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.

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Product & Technology is looking for a Software Engineer to join the Streaming Data Platform team within the Tech Enablement Alliance organization. The mission of the team is to build tooling, standards and processes for teams within all of DEEP&T’s teams.

We build the platform that powers reliable, real-time data for the company. Our stack standardizes data contracts (Smithy-based schema/API registry, code-gen), captures end-to-end lineage (OpenLineage), and hardens streaming pipelines (Spark, Kinesis) so product and analytics teams can ship quickly with confidence.

As a Software Engineer, you’ll ship platform features that make streaming data safe, observable, and cost-efficient by default. You’ll collaborate with senior engineers on designs, own well-scoped components end-to-end, and help client teams adopt contracts + lineage through SDKs, agents, and operational playbooks.

Responsibilities:

• Participate in the full lifecycle of software development (requirements gathering, designing, building, testing, maintenance, and support)

• Write solid docs, examples, and migration playbooks; participate in code reviews.

• Join an on-call rotation with support from senior engineers and managers; contribute to post-incident learning.

• Collaborate with product teams, engineering teams, data analysts and data scientists to design and build data-forward solutions

• Integrate with a variety of teams and domains, ranging from advertising, web analytics, and consumer devices

• Drive and maintain a culture of quality, innovation and experimentation.

• Work with other teams, evangelize the platform, best-practices, data driven decisions, identify new use cases and features and drive adoption.

• Contribute to internal SDKs/agents (Python/Scala/Java) that make adoption “drop-in.”

Basic Qualifications:

• 3 years of software engineering, ideally using a JVM language (Java, Kotlin, Scala is a big plus).

• Knowledge and experience with distributed systems, their development, operations, observability

• Practical AWS exposure (S3, IAM), and CI/CD familiarity.

• Automated testing at different levels (unit, integration, functional, performance, etc.)

• Cross-functional approach to software development, devOps experience

• You're a self-learner, independent, and have excellent problem-solving skills.

• You care deeply about craftsmanship in your software, and can work backwards from the customer experience.

• You have excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Bonus Points:

• Experience or interest in Scala, functional programming.

• Experience with data contracts (OpenAPI, Smithy, Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema) and code-generation.

• Experience with streaming data pipelines using tools such as Kinesis, Kafka, Storm, or Flink

• Experience with building automation and reliability in large scale systems, immutable infrastructure, containerization, including tools such as Jenkins, Docker, EC2, ECS, K8s, Github Actions.

• Familiarity with binary data serialization formats such as Protobuf, Parquet, Avro, or Thrift

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

About Disney Entertainment & ESPN Product & Technology:

At Disney Corporate you can see how the businesses behind the Company’s powerful brands come together to create the most innovative, far-reaching and admired entertainment company in the world. As a member of a corporate team, you’ll work with world-class leaders driving the strategies that keep The Walt Disney Company at the leading edge of entertainment. See and be seen by other innovative thinkers as you enable the greatest storytellers in the world to create memories for millions of families around the globe.