Senior Software Engineer, Media Engineering

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 improve 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

Media Engineering is an innovative, collaborative organization that 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, and metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

Media Engineering’s Core Media Processing & Packaging team develops the video encoding, packaging, and orchestration systems that power Disney’s video streaming platforms (Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu). We are looking for hardworking team players to join Media Engineering, who will thrive on Disney’s story telling legacy, who will embrace unconventional thinking, and who are passionate about contributing to The Walt Disney Company’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) experience.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Core Media Processing & Packaging Engineering team, you’ll be responsible for:

The design, documentation, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of complex software systems.

• Collaborating with engineering and project managers to define and report on individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables.

• Applying Agile methodology and practices, including participation in regular scrums, sprint planning, and backlog grooming.

• Develop, maintain, and optimize the contribution encoder workflow to ensure high-quality and low-latency video and audio transmission.

• Contributing to a culture of collaboration, innovation, and open communication across several teams and stakeholders.

• Providing support to operations teams as needed.

• Debugging complex issues involving workflows across multiple systems in a live production environment.

• Contributing to the team's core fundamental software project needs by applying best practices and standard software guidelines.

• Following established protocols for installation and maintenance and completing subsequent documentation.

• Collaborating with other engineers to deliver new features and bug requirements.

• Participating in the code reviews

• Multitasking and self-time management across multiple simultaneous projects.

• Mentor more junior engineers on design and implementation best practices.

Required Qualifications

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related software engineering field.

• 5+ years of software architecture and development experience.

• Deep programming experience in C/C++

• Experience with Continuous Integration and Deployment tools such as Github, Jenkins 2, Ansible, and Docker

• Working knowledge of collaboration tools such as Jira and Confluence

Additional Preferred Experience

• Experience with audio or video encoding and streaming technologies, including video encoding/compression, HLS packaging, and associated metadata workflows preferred.

• Experience with SMPTE ST 2110 standards to manage uncompressed video over IP networks. 

• Experience with troubleshooting JPEG 2000 (J2K) encoding and decoding processes. 

• Experience working with MPEG Transport Streams (MPEG-TS) for both live and recorded content, including feature development, stream analysis, and supporting stream compliancy.

• Experience developing and deploying applications in AWS (S3, EC2, Lambdas, SNS/SQS Messaging, API Gateway) or similar cloud environment preferred.

• Solid programming experience in Java