Sr Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology (DEEP&T) 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.

The Business Operations team leads strategy and development of technology responsible for driving the day-to-day operation of the DEEP&T organization, including project and portfolio management and tracking; organization-level capital, space, and resource management and allocation; process management; technical incident management; and our administrative and workplace experience support team.

Job Summary:

Join our Business Operations engineering team as a Senior Software Engineer and become a core driver of organizational efficiency. You will play a key role in the development, maintenance, and enhancement of our critical application portfolio.

In this role, you will leverage your deep technical expertise to deliver immediate impact, owning the end-to-end development of complex, medium-to-large-scale features and resolving high-priority system defects. You will act as a go-to technical authority, actively mentoring peers, defining and championing engineering best practices, and contributing to architectural decision-making.

A growing portion of the team's roadmap involves surfaces that interface with large language models (LLMs) — assistive flows, summarization, search, and tool-use experiences embedded into our internal platforms. This role is an opportunity for a strong frontend engineer to grow into that work alongside more senior AI-application practitioners on the team.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Technical Leadership & Expertise

• Own the design, development, and successful deployment of medium-to-large size software solutions, ensuring performance, quality, scalability, and security.
• Drive software engineering best practices, including design, code quality, security and testability within the team.
• Exhibit deep and broad technical expertise, with hands-on proficiency in key functional/specialty areas.
• Serve as a primary technical resource for the team, offering guidance on technical issues and new feature development.
• Participate in the design and delivery of features that integrate with LLM-backed services. For example streaming chat surfaces, structured-output forms, retrieval-grounded search, and tool-use interactions, partnering with senior AI-application engineers on the team.
• Help establish and refine team practices for using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) effectively and responsibly in day-to-day development.

Execution & Impact

• Solve complex technical problems with an innovative and experimental can-do attitude grounded by advanced technical skill and technique.
• Conduct thorough code reviews, focusing on requirements, design and coding standards, readability, testability, and optimization.
• Mentor and guide the work of less experienced engineers to develop solutions.
• Identify opportunities and recommend the development or implementation of solutions to improve products or processes with each iteration.
• Document technical details for assigned features, fixes, and projects.

Autonomy & Influence

• Work independently with minimal guidance, applying judgment in selecting methods and techniques to resolve issues or satisfy requests.
• Make timely, informed technical decisions that moderately influence the work of team members and related projects.
• Participate in developing new technical approaches and tools.
• Communicate complex technical information effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
• Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and scalable code.
• Strong proficiency in React.js and its ecosystem (Hooks, Context API, React Router, etc.).
• Experience with state management libraries (Redux etc).
• Knowledge of TypeScript for better type safety and scalability.
• Understanding of modern UI/UX principles and component-driven development.
• Strong experience with Node.js, Express.js, or NestJS for building APIs.
• Proficiency in RESTful APIs and GraphQL development.
• Knowledge of authentication & authorization (JWT, OAuth, OpenID).
• Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
• Understanding of testing frameworks (Jest, Mocha, Cypress, JUnit).

Preferred Qualifications

Frontend depth and platform experience

• Experience with server-side rendering and modern React frameworks (Next.js, Remix) or comparable meta-frameworks.
• Experience building or contributing to a shared component library or design system at scale.
• Experience with real-time UIs — streaming responses, WebSockets/SSE, optimistic updates, partial rendering.
• Performance engineering experience — Core Web Vitals, bundle optimization, profiling, rendering performance.

AI-assisted development

• Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) as a regular part of your workflow — beyond inline autocomplete.
• Experience authoring durable project context for AI tools — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, Cursor rules, custom skills, or comparable artifacts that encode team conventions.
• Familiarity with plan-first / spec-first workflows when working with coding agents (plan mode, milestones, review gates) and with structured review of AI-generated code (hallucinated APIs, plausible-but-wrong logic, security regressions, prompt-injection risk in agentic flows).

AI application exposure (growth-area; not required)

• Experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or equivalent) into web applications, even at the level of one or two shipped or seriously prototyped features.
• Experience building user-facing surfaces for LLM features — streaming UIs, tool-use / function-calling interactions, structured output rendering, citation and grounding UX, regeneration and interruption flows.
• Familiarity with the TypeScript AI ecosystem (Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, LangChain.js, official OpenAI/Anthropic TS SDKs, MCP clients) or working knowledge of the Python AI ecosystem (LangChain, LlamaIndex, evaluation frameworks).
• Awareness of LLM-application concerns in production: evaluation strategies (golden datasets, regression checks, LLM-as-judge with appropriate skepticism), observability and tracing (Langfuse, LangSmith, Helicone, OTel-based), token accounting, latency budgets, caching, and content safety.
• Awareness of AI-specific risks in user-facing surfaces — prompt injection via user input or retrieved content, output validation, PII handling, and responsible-use considerations.

Domain & ways of working

• Experience building internal tools, developer platforms, or operations applications at scale.
• Experience working in a large, cross-functional engineering organization — coordinating across teams, navigating shared platforms, and contributing to org-wide standards.
• Experience in media, entertainment, sports, or streaming technology is a plus but not required.

Required Education

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $148,700.00 to $199,400.00 per year, and in Glendale, CA is $141,900.00 to $190,300.00 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.