Description
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.
The Work: We build and operate Disney’s end-to-end media platform - acquisition, processing, metadata, and delivery readiness. When someone hits play on Disney+, Hulu, or ESPN+, our systems make it happen. Fast, reliable, at scale.
What You’ll Actually Do:
- Design and build backend services that process and serve media at scale
- Write code, review code, debug production issues,the usual engineering loop
- Work on systems handling video pipelines across multiple streaming platforms
- Collaborate with other teams when our work intersects (it often does)
- Help teammates grow,share knowledge, give honest feedback, be someone others can learn from.
What We’re Looking For:
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience building production systems
- Strong JVM fundamentals – we recently moved to JDK 25 (Java or Scala, ideally both)
- Real experience with distributed systems,not just “I read about it”
- Solid understanding of AWS services (DynamoDB, SNS/SQS, S3), PostgreSQL
- Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude, Kiro, or similar),we use them every day and expect engineers to leverage AI to move faster
- You can debug across service boundaries and actually enjoy figuring out why something broke
- You communicate clearly,in code, in docs, in conversation
Good to have:
- Experience with Kafka or similar event streaming platforms
- Background in media/video processing pipelines
- Hands-on Kubernetes experience (deploying, scaling, debugging workloads)
- Familiarity with observability tooling (distributed tracing, metrics, logging)
- You’ve operated what you’ve built and care about how it runs in production
The hiring range for this position in New York is $145,400 to $195,000 per year.