Lead Product Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • San Francisco, CA

3d • $163,100 - $228,600 • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Product Software Engineer to join their team. This role involves building the analytics platform used across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, enabling users to understand business metrics through AI-powered insights and natural language querying. The platform includes a React front end, backend services, and an integration layer with BI and data-warehouse systems. The engineer will lead major projects, set technical direction, and collaborate with product, design, and data partners to create robust and scalable systems. The team focuses on making AI the fastest path from a business question to a trusted answer.

Requirements

• 7+ years building highly scalable, performant full-stack web applications serving millions of users and requests.
• A regular practitioner of agentic software development: AI coding agents and agent-driven workflows are a core part of how you build, and you can raise a team's effectiveness with them.
• A track record of delivering agentic analytics solutions in production: analytics or data products built on LLMs or agents (for example, natural-language querying, agent-driven insight generation, or prompt-to-dashboard).
• Expert-level command of React, TypeScript, and JavaScript, with strong Node.js; comfortable working across the full stack, from UI through back-end services and APIs.
• Proven track record architecting sophisticated technical changes and driving cross-team consensus on the approach.
• Experience defining and implementing API specifications in collaboration with service and back-end teams.
• Strong performance-engineering fundamentals (rendering, data fetching, caching) for data-heavy or high-traffic systems.
• Track record of owning projects beginning to end and driving complex problems to root cause and resolution.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineers, including senior engineers, by building trust and giving clear feedback.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software or Electrical Engineering, a comparable field, and/or equivalent work experience.

Nice To Haves

• Working proficiency in Python and/or Java for back-end services, data tooling, or integrations.
• Shipped production React/Node.js applications with high availability and throughput on a cloud platform (e.g., AWS).
• Experience with data visualization at scale: charting, large and high-cardinality datasets, interactive and filterable dashboards.
• Familiarity with BI and data-warehouse stacks (e.g., Looker/LookML, Snowflake, Databricks) and partnering with data and analytics teams.
• Experience with configuration-driven or schema-driven UI systems (product defined as data or "as code").
• Expert understanding of web accessibility (WCAG) fundamentals.
• Broad knowledge of web standards and emerging technologies

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver agentic analytics experiences: natural-language and AI-assisted dashboard authoring, agent-accessible surfaces, and AI-generated insights with human-in-the-loop review.
• Build the foundations these depend on: a semantic, machine-readable representation of metrics and surfaces so agents can do what the app can, plus the evaluation and guardrails that keep AI output trustworthy.
• Lead projects end to end: partner with product, design, and data teams to scope ambiguous problems and distill requirements into clear design and technical specifications.
• Own the high-leverage architectural decisions for the projects you lead (rendering, data fetching, caching, state, service boundaries, API contracts), document them, and guide other engineers in carrying them out.
• Build the full path: a responsive React front end, the Node.js (and Python or Java) services behind it, and the APIs and data-integration layer that feed it.
• Evolve a configuration and schema-driven system that lets new dashboards and metrics ship through config and CI validation rather than bespoke code, treating product surfaces as data.
• Engineer for dashboard-shaped traffic across client and server: optimize data fetching, caching, request batching, and progressive and streaming rendering so complex, high-cardinality views load fast and scale to a large concurrent audience.
• Write, maintain, standardize, and enforce code quality through testing (including test-driven development where it fits), code review, observability, and accessible, resilient UI.
• See work through from specification to production and ongoing operation.
• Mentor engineers at all levels, including senior engineers, through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing; build trust, set goals, and give constructive feedback.
• Drive the evolution of the team's practices and standards, including agentic engineering workflows that raise how fast and how well the team ships, and build cross-team consensus for technical direction.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior