Software Engineer II

The Walt Disney Company • New York, NY

22h • 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 through products like Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. The Product Engineering team is responsible for the engineering of digital and streaming products and platforms, including media engineering, quality assurance, personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity. The Observability & Insights group specifically ensures the reliability and performance of Disney Streaming’s distributed systems by translating operational data into actionable insights. This group aims to reduce toil through automation and AI-enabled workflows, accelerating developer productivity and innovation. They build telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling to help engineers understand system health and act quickly.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering or equivalent training.
• Experience developing and testing features within existing codebases.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Java, Python, or Node.js.
• Experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and Kubernetes.
• Understanding observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, distributed tracing, alerting, SLIs/SLOs.
• Ability to break down features into tasks and communicate clearly about technical issues and decisions.
• Ability to participate in architecture discussions and contribute to code reviews.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with modern observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, OpenSearch).
• Familiarity with building telemetry or real-time data pipelines.
• Experience participating in incident response or reliability engineering processes.

Responsibilities

• Build and Evolve Observability Tooling and Platforms: Develop and enhance tools for metrics, logs, traces, event correlation, insights dashboards, and monitoring services.
• Write clean, maintainable code that integrates existing observability frameworks while continually improving performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Implement features within telemetry ingestion pipelines and storage layers that support high-volume, low latency data processing.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and management using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools.
• Improve System Visibility and Operational Insights: Collaborate with service engineering teams to design and instrument consistent, high-quality telemetry.
• Build dashboards, automated reports, and insightful visualizations to help engineers detect anomalies and understand root causes faster.
• Work with incident response partners to refine and automate alerting mechanisms.
• Participate in Architecture, Design, and Code Quality Processes: Contribute to technical design documents for new observability features and improvements.
• Participate in peer code reviews, offering constructive feedback and learning from more senior engineers’ approaches.
• Help evaluate technical tradeoffs and propose improvements to existing observability patterns.
• Support Reliability, Incident Response, and Continuous Improvement: Assist in improving service reliability by leveraging observability tools.
• Contribute to post-incident reviews by proposing durable changes to telemetry, alerting, or insights workflows.
• Identify opportunities to automate manual developer or SRE workflows.
• Collaborate and Take Ownership Within the Team: Break down incoming features into actionable engineering tasks with clear deliverables and timelines.
• Document changes, patterns, and best practices.
• Begin taking ownership of specific subsystems or components within the observability platform, with support from senior engineers.
• Support and mentor interns or early-career team members.

Benefits

• A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package
• 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