Sr Media Performance Engineer, Distribution

Job ID 10111953 Location Amsterdam, Netherlands Business Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology Date posted Feb. 11, 2025

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Job Summary:

About the Role & Team

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 our 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 enhance 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: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power our 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 implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

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

About the Team

The Media Experience, Performance Engineering - Distribution Team is nested at the intersection of technology and innovation within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET).

What You Will Do

In the role of Media Experience Senior Performance Engineer on the Distribution team, your daily responsibilities will require a combination of strategic planning, time management around internal initiatives, an ability to collaborate with development, operations and engineering teams, a hands-on approach to leadership and mentoring within the larger Media Experience organization, while utilizing cross-functional skills to ensure optimal performance across the Media Experience Distribution team and Disney owned and operated streaming services.

This position offers an opportunity for personal and professional growth, providing exposure to cutting-edge technology within the realm of streaming services.

Analyze health of products utilizing internal and third-party tooling
Act as first responder to both internal and external delivery escalations
Execute mitigation steps to limit windows of impact
Curate documentation for issue tracking and impact analysis
Manage distribution policies using internal tooling
Support live events, high-profile content sunrises and feature releases

Required Qualifications & Skills

3+ years of substantial experience in streaming media, content distribution, or video technology.
3-5+ years of proven expertise in Live Video Streaming Systems, including encoding, distribution, and playback.
Comprehensive understanding of the live and VOD content delivery life cycle – “glass to glass”.
Experience in implementing distributed systems with a focus on microservice architecture.
Proven success in a high-availability, large-scale production environment on AWS or another public cloud.
In-depth knowledge of video compression, codec standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1), encoding bitrate ladders, and rate control.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to mentor junior team members.
Strong quantitative, analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and decision-making skills.
Proficient interfacing with OTT and mobile devices (Roku, Game Consoles, Apple TV, Android, iOS, etc.).
Familiarity with network-level tools; ThousandEyes, Kentik, Catchpoint.
Expert use of data visualization tools; Grafana, Datadog, Kibana, Splunk.
Understanding of CDNs and their relation to network operations, transit, and peering.
Experience in designing and maintaining a matrix of complex documentation.
Experience with ticketing and tracking systems like JIRA and Confluence.
Confidence in negotiating and working with third-party services and device manufacturers.
Background in technical project management.
Ability to conduct independent research.
Analytical self-starter mindset.
Consistent track record of delivering results through ambiguity.
Knowledge of video streaming quality metrics and technical aspects affecting the viewer experience.
Ability to identify and resolve performance issues, optimizing end-user experience.
Hands-on experience with tooling used to analyze subscriber data, trends, and performance metrics.

Preferred Qualifications

Exposure to Live and VOD Video Streaming Systems
Strong desire to showcase understanding of encoding, distribution, and playback.

The Walt Disney Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We strive to be a diverse workforce that is representative of our audiences, and where all can thrive and belong. Disney is committed to forming a team that includes and respects a variety of voices, identities, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.

This role will be based within the Netherlands

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About Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at the vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

This position is with TWDC (Benelux) BV, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology.

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Explore this Location EMEA

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