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.

• 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.

About the Business

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, 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.

Job Summary:

Disney's Media Engineering Android team is seeking an experienced Software Engineer who is excited to build apps enjoyed by millions around the world. You will be building scalable, elegant solutions for all of Disney’s Android applications that stream video across a wide array of devices including phones, tablets, and TVs. Our highly collaborative group works in tandem with many cross-functional teams. We value pristine communication skills, both written and verbal, as well as a bias for action. We are incredibly invested in maintaining high code quality standards with unit tests, automated tests, modern libraries, and a Kotlin codebase. We strive to build the best Live and video-on-demand (VOD) applications in the world, and we look forward to hearing more about your skills and how they can help us achieve this lofty goal.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

As a Senior Android Engineer at Disney, you are ready and willing to be responsible for a wide array of technical aspects. You assist with critical components including our release process, remote configuration management, and live production issues. You have and will lead entire projects from start to finish. While familiar with the high-level aspects of our project as a whole, you are also focused on and monitoring the health of the team. You not only seek out leadership opportunities to improve processes, but you do it with finesse and a positive attitude. You are comfortable facilitating career growth amongst team members and are invested in the long-term success of the company.

Responsibilities

• Develop an understanding of the DE&ET software stack and specifically the MediaX component

• Maintain and update the Android variant of the Disney Media Player

• Understand the internals of android and how to debug and diagnose Android Device issues.  

• Collaborate with application development teams, services engineering teams and product management to help understand and explain device limitations and requirements

• Ensure that the latest audio and video standards like Dolby Vision, Dolby ATMOS, DTS:X, HDR10+, and more are delivered with full fidelity.

• Develop, Debug, Test and Benchmark various components in the software stack

• Perform online code reviews of pull requests

• Gather additional requirements and spec missing functionality required across various functional teams

• Create and update documentation across the entire software development lifecycle as needed

• Maintain a strong understanding of our code to identify, research and address issues

• Contribute to  strategies that ensure the quality and stability of our deployments, including testing strategies and telemetry approaches

• Help to develop our project’s build system and continuous integration system as needed

Basic Qualifications 

• 5+ years of production experience with Kotlin and the Android SDK

• Proficiency with Reactive Programming and Dependency Injection

• Well-versed in different architectural patterns (MVI/MVVM or equivalent)

• Pristine communication skills who can collaborate well across teams

• You write phenomenal code, tests, and documentation

• Experience resolving production issues ideally on a large scale

Preferred Qualifications 

• Comfortable using common Android libraries such as Dagger 2 / Hilt, RxJava2, Groupie

• Familiarity with Android TV / Amazon Fire TV development

• Experience with streaming video, codecs, and DRM

• Knowledgeable about maintaining a large modularized codebase

• Experience using performance evaluation tools such as Android Profiler 

• Knowledge or Experience with Rust

• Knowledge or Experience with JNI and native development on Android

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $145,400.00 to $195,000.00 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.