Sr Product Software Engineer - Ad Decisioning Engineering

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

The Ad Serving Engineering organization within Disney Entertainment and the ESPN organization is fully responsible for building, enhancing, and maintaining the high-performance, distributed, microservice-based Digital Advertising Platform. The platform is charged with the qualification, delivery, and tracking of Digital Advertising campaigns (Video on Demand, Live TV, and innovative interactive ads) across all of Disney online properties, including Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+.

In addition, Ad Serving teams collaborate in the development of supporting components, such as anti-ad fatigue systems, impression counting pipelines, and ad experience flows. We also work on integrations with critical services responsible for the entitlements, correct pacing, targeting, selection of ads, and third-party systems.

As part of the Decisioning Fleet, you will directly contribute to optimizing ad qualification and selection to make sure viewers always see the right ad at the right time. You will also help build tools that analyze what ads are competing for slots for ad breaks across Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, and others.

As a Senior Software Engineer of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software.

Daily, you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.

• An understanding of the importance of project ownership.

• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast-paced environment.

• An understanding of micro-service encapsulation and loose coupling, and why they are important.

• An understanding of how to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health and to manage risk.

• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.

Responsibilities:

• Designing, implementing, and testing solutions to various engineering problems in a high-throughput, low-latency microservices environment.

• Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors, and alerts.

• Reading and understanding product user stories, and then translating them into actionable tasks, including identifying where AI/ML-driven solutions may be applicable.

• Taking ownership of one or more of the team's domain areas.

• Understanding and using automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.

• Available for On-Call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule.

• Design and integrate AI/ML-supported functionality when appropriate, such as LLM-assisted processing or model-driven decisioning.

• Develop and refine prompts and evaluation of workflows when working with LLM-based APIs.

• Adding evaluation/observability for LLM workloads (telemetry, traces, guardrails)

• Building agentic workflows (multi-step, tool-using agents) and supporting multi-agent orchestration patterns (MCP, agent-to-agent)

• Collaborate with data science and ML platform teams to operationalize models and embed ML-driven features.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.

• Proficiency with Java.

• Demonstrable analytical / problem-solving skills.

• Great communication, collaboration skills, and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Familiarity with core AI/ML concepts (e.g., embeddings, vector similarity, prompt patterns, model evaluation) or willingness to rapidly learn.

• Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph)

• Awareness of guardrails, safety, eval, and cost-aware usage

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience with:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects.

• Non-relational database technologies like DynamoDB.

• Caching datastores such as Redis, ValKey or MemCache.

• Data Streaming Mechanisms such as Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis.

• Cloud platforms such as AWS.

• Modern DevOps tools such as Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.

• Domain knowledge in the Ad Tech industry.

• Experience integrating with external LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock)

• Experience with multi-agent orchestration (LangGraph, MCP, A2A)

• Experience instrumenting LLM calls with traces and evaluations (e.g., LangSmith)

• Experience with prompt / tool pattern design, function calling, streaming, and context management

Additional Information:

• Engineers are expected to be in the office four days a week.

• This role is hiring in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Glendale, or Seattle

#disneytech

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, California is $141,900 to 190,300 per year, Seattle, WA is $148,700 to $199,400, and San Francisco, CA is $155,400 to $208,400 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.