Lead Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Glendale, CA

7d • $155,700 - $218,700 • Hybrid

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to design and build intelligent, AI-driven systems that enhance the reliability and performance of Disney’s large-scale streaming ecosystem. This role involves developing agentic systems, machine learning models, and real-time pipelines to transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive insights. The autonomous agents will reason over complex system behavior, identifying issues in real time and driving faster resolution across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. The engineer will partner closely with engineering, product, and platform teams to embed this intelligence directly into operational workflows, improving system resilience and subscriber experience at scale. Additionally, the role includes delivering high-quality features end-to-end, contributing to system design and code reviews, and owning components of production systems within a fast-paced, AI-native engineering environment.

Requirements

• 7+ years of applicable experience in backend development, including building AI-powered or data driven applications and scalable APIs (e.g. FastAPI, Flask)
• Proficiency in Spark, Pyspark, Python or similar programming language
• Experience implementing production-grade systems at scale within a fast-paced, distributed environment.
• Strong AI/ML engineering experience, including orchestrating foundation models (e.g. Claude, OpenAI, Qwen) using frameworks like LangChain or LangGraph.
• Familiarity with developing, training, or fine-tuning models using frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate engineering velocity.
• Experience with modern development practices, including version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker), and cloud-native deployments (AWS/EKS).
• Strong understanding of API design, microservices architecture, and standard SDLC workflows.
• Strong analytical and technical skills to troubleshoot issues, perform rapid iteration and quickly come up with possible solutions
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work cross-functionally and clearly explain complex technical concepts
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

Nice To Haves

• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Conviva) and handling high-volume telemetry data.
• Familiarity with large-scale data platforms and distributed data processing tools (e.g., PySpark, Pandas, Databricks, Snowflake).
• Knowledge of prompt design, model evaluation, and fine-tuning foundation models (GPT-4, Claude).

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and implement production-grade, distributed systems that leverage real-time telemetry signals and AI-driven anomaly detection to optimize the health, resilience, and reliability of the global streaming ecosystem.
• Define the architectural patterns and scaling strategies for agentic AI systems powered by modern foundation models (e.g., Claude, GPT-4) to enable automated reasoning and predictive modeling for real-time system health and reliability.
• Develop end-to-end data and decisioning pipelines that transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into actionable insights, automated detection, and root cause analysis.
• Create and deploy scalable APIs and services that deliver predictive signals, explainability, and insights to engineering teams, operational tools, and product stakeholders.
• Partner cross-functionally to embed intelligence into workflows (incident response, release validation, subscriber experience insights), improving speed and reducing operational overhead.
• Drive innovation in observability, reliability, and developer productivity through applied AI and new approaches.
• Define and drive the team’s engineering standards and best practices when it comes to clean, well-tested code, thorough code reviews, and mature CI/CD, owning components of production systems and mentor junior engineers.

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