Software Engineer II

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 here:

• 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

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.

Disney Streaming is looking for a Software Engineer II to join the Playback Quality Optimization team inside the Media Engineering organization. They play a critical role in the experience our customers enjoy with our streaming services. They focus on both managing and observing the quality of the playback users get while watching video. This includes making decisions in real time about how to optimize the Quality of Experience as well as collecting information about how the playback performed which is analyzed to continue improving the experience. This team writes components which embed directly into the video players as well as analytic tools around the results.

As a Software Engineer II on this team, you will build software which will help us to refine and define our analytic techniques used for evaluating the performance of new playback and optimization algorithms and work with our existing predictive models and help build new models to improve the quality of video playback for our customers. There will be opportunities to collaborate with a varied team of data engineers, other software engineers, researchers, product managers and more, as well as to provide leadership by example to other developers on the team and in the organization.

If you enjoy streaming media, are interested in live sports and entertainment, or just want to join a fast-growing team that plays an integral part of the revenue producing arm of a company, then our team is for you.

Responsibilities

• Ability to analyze data to product insights to feed back into model development 

• Apply statistical analysis techniques, including hypothesis testing, regression analysis, and data visualization.

Basic Qualifications:

• Minimum of 3 years of related work experience.

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

• Proficient in SQL with a focus on data manipulation, analysis, and visualization

• Proficient in Pandas, SciPy, NumPy and/or R

• Experience with Spark and the Databricks platform

• Experience implementing and training machine learning models, evaluating their performance, and fine-tuning hyperparameters

• Prior domain experience with video/audio streaming

• Strong teamwork and collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $117,998 to $158,290 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $112,586 to $151,030; and the hiring range for this position in San Francisco, California is $123,328 to $165,440 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.