Distinguished Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

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. Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity. This Distinguished Software Engineer position is an executive and architectural role within the Product Engineering Architecture team. The Product Engineering Architecture team is a central group of senior engineers that work to shape a cohesive technology vision across the DE&E Product & Technology organization. This role will be responsible for driving the largest technical conversations across the organization and shaping the foundational solutions of our technology platform. This role will partner with individual contributors and leaders to ask the challenging questions and lead teams through change leveraging its own deep expertise and experience.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 15+ years of experience in software development or a relevant technical field.
• Expertise in one or more complex domains, capable of mapping solutions to the business and technology landscape.
• Extensive experience influencing significant industry change and growth at scale.
• Ability to communicate broad strategic vision and distill highly complex technical topics for both engineering teams and executive audiences.
• Deep grasp of the software development lifecycle and ability to resolve the most complex, strategic-level technical challenges.
• Experience across a breadth of relevant technical domains including full-stack development, cloud solutions (e.g., DynamoDB, Redis), modern deployment (e.g., Kubernetes, Terraform), and performance monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Drive the largest technical conversations and architect strategic priorities across the organization.
• Shape and drive the foundational solutions of the technology platform and alliance-wide software stack.
• Provide strategic and operational technical leadership, ensuring systems are scalable, robust, and aligned with industry trends.
• Lead key engineering decisions and set alliance-wide technical standards for the entire software stack.
• Partner with individual contributors and leaders to ask challenging questions and lead teams through technological change.
• Coordinate complex, multi-alliance initiatives to achieve DE&E Product & Technology level OKRs.
• Guide company-wide architecture and strategy with deep foresight into emerging trends and future needs.
• Represent the company at industry events, standards-bodies, and technical panels.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees