Product Software Engineer II

The Walt Disney Company • Seattle, CT

8d • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization focused on building and advancing the technological backbone for Disney’s media business. The team combines technology with creativity to develop world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive innovation and scalability. They work across The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio, impacting millions of users globally. This role is within the Product Engineering team, which is responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms, including personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

As a member of the Watch Experience Delivery team, you will contribute to building and supporting the backend services and APIs that power ESPN’s watch and streaming experiences across various platforms. The team focuses on delivering personalized and scalable watch experiences for millions of users, supporting live events, replays, highlights, multiview experiences, stream menus, and other critical streaming workflows.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field - or equivalent experience
• 3+ years of experience developing backend systems or APIs in Java (Spring Boot preferred)
• Familiarity with cloud - native development, particularly in AWS (ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, S3, etc.)
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability stacks (DataDog, New Relic, CloudWatch)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git, build systems (e.g., TeamCity, Jenkins), and containerized deployments
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, caching strategies, and performance optimization
• Comfortable working in high-stakes environments with live event traffic and tight SLAs
• Leverage agentic AI development tools such as Cursor and Claude Code to accelerate development workflows, including code generation, test creation, debugging, and operational automation across APIs and infrastructure
• Participate in regular on call rotation and major event coverage throughout the many sports seasons
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with frontend development using Angular or similar frameworks for internal tools
• Experience with HAProxy, Varnish, CDN configuration, and edge caching strategies
• Exposure to media/streaming workflows (e.g., content metadata, playback services, personalization APIs)
• Experience working on large-scale distributed systems in high-availability environments
• Comfortable in fast paced environments with agile ceremonies, triage sessions, and cross-team coordination
• Strong communication skills with a passion for collaborative problem solving
• Drive adoption of agentic AI-assisted development workflows, using tools like Cursor and Claude Code to improve developer velocity, code quality, and operational efficiency across the Watch Services platform

Responsibilities

• Implement features and resolve defects within backend services and APIs supporting ESPN watch experiences.
• Contribute to the development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of scalable backend systems delivering high-traffic streaming and content experiences.
• Analyze and troubleshoot engineering problems involving distributed systems, high-throughput APIs, caching layers, and cloud-based infrastructure.
• Participate in code reviews while applying engineering best practices, coding standards, testing strategies, and operational excellence principles.
• Collaborate with product managers, frontend teams, platform teams, and partner engineering organizations to design and implement reliable and scalable solutions.
• Support mission-critical live sports and streaming platforms with an emphasis on reliability, resiliency, observability, performance, and operational readiness.
• Participate in team on-call rotations, live event support, and incident response activities.
• Contribute to sprint planning, technical design discussions, estimation, and delivery execution.
• Research and experiment with emerging technologies and AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve developer productivity and platform capabilities.
• Grow technical and professional skills through mentorship, feedback, and hands-on experience with modern distributed backend systems.
• Be involved in the requirements gathering, analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of systems that support or enhance other applications within our environment.
• Collaborate and troubleshoot with the rest of the team in the analysis and resolution of complex engineering problems involving high-traffic web application services, distributed systems, caching layers, and APIs, including participation in on-call rotations and live event operational support.
• Think of new ways to help make our watch platform more scalable, resilient, performant, and reliable while partnering across teams to bring ideas into production.
• Research, learn, and apply new technologies and modern engineering practices.

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: Mid Level