Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2026
About The Position
The Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DE&ET) organization plays a central role in the future growth of The Walt Disney Company. Our team is responsible for worldwide linear and digital media distribution, design and development of all consumer-facing digital products, advertising technology, consumer data, and international broadcast operations. Our employees are leading, creating, and innovating, making bold moves in unexpected directions that redefine not just what a media company does, but what it can do. With The Walt Disney Company, you can be part of media's evolution, helping us create what's next. Be a part of an innovative team and culture… This role falls within the Core Media Technology (CMT) team in DE&ET's Media Engineering organization. CMT is one of our Research and Advanced Development teams whose focus is in the domain of video and audio processing that drives enhancements into our video processing platform for live and on-demand video streaming delivery. Our work involves optimizing media encoding, introducing new media codecs, developing video quality and performance assessment frameworks and conducting innovative media research towards the development of future platform capabilities.
Requirements
- Knowledge and experience in Python
- Understanding or experience with Linux
- Strong communication skills, both verbal and written
- Proficiency in data analysis and analytical thinking
- Strong ability to multi-task and context-switch with ease in a fast-paced, and ever-evolving organization
- Be enrolled in an accredited college/university pursuing a degree taking at least one class in the semester/quarter (spring/fall) prior to participation in the internship program AND returning to school the semester/quarter following the internship OR currently participating in a Disney College Program or Disney Internship.
- Current Disney Interns, College, International, or Culinary Program Participants: You may only work for ONE consecutive year (12 months) in any combination of an internship and/or program.
- Be at least 18 years of age
- Possess unrestricted work authorization
- Fully available from M-F, 40 hours each week for the entire program duration: May/June - August/September 2026 (12 weeks)
- Available for one evening meeting weekly with our extended Beijing team (typically 8-9pm ET Mondays)
- Able to provide own housing for the duration internship program in San Francisco, CA or Morrisville, NC
- Able to provide/have reliable transportation to/from work
Nice To Haves
- Experience developing and optimizing AI/ML models and frameworks
- Knowledge and experience with Python libraries such as pandas/NumPy for data analysis and matplotlib/plotly for visualization
- Video encoding and codec (e.g. H264, H265, AV1) experience
- Experience with data visualization and analysis
- Experience with building web-apps/dashboards for data visualization
- Experience with working with Dockers
Responsibilities
- Contributing to one of our advanced media ML/AI processing projects
- Developing python-based scripts to drive media analysis
- Developing web-apps/dashboards for data visualization
- Contributing to subjective experiments evaluating video quality
- Testing and evaluating new video codecs
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Intern
Industry
Motion Picture and Sound Recording Industries
Number of Employees
5,001-10,000 employees
