Sr Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Glendale, WA

16d • $141,900 - $199,400 • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology (DEEP&T) is a global organization focused on building and advancing the technological backbone for Disney’s media business. The team combines technology with creativity to create world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive innovation and scalability. The Business Operations team within DEEP&T is responsible for strategy and development of technology that drives the day-to-day operations of the organization. This includes project and portfolio management, capital and resource allocation, process management, technical incident management, and administrative and workplace experience support.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Business Operations engineering team, you will be a key contributor to the development, maintenance, and enhancement of the critical application portfolio. You will leverage your technical expertise to deliver features end-to-end, resolve high-priority defects, and act as a technical authority. A significant part of the team's roadmap involves integrating with large language models (LLMs) for features like assistive flows, summarization, search, and tool-use within internal platforms. This role offers an opportunity for a strong frontend engineer to develop expertise in AI applications.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
• Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and scalable code.
• Strong proficiency in React.js and its ecosystem (Hooks, Context API, React Router, etc.).
• Experience with state management libraries (Redux etc).
• Knowledge of TypeScript for better type safety and scalability.
• Understanding of modern UI/UX principles and component-driven development.
• Strong experience with Node.js, Express.js, or NestJS for building APIs.
• Proficiency in RESTful APIs and GraphQL development.
• Knowledge of authentication & authorization (JWT, OAuth, OpenID).
• Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
• Understanding of testing frameworks (Jest, Mocha, Cypress, JUnit).
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with server-side rendering and modern React frameworks (Next.js, Remix) or comparable meta-frameworks.
• Experience building or contributing to a shared component library or design system at scale.
• Experience with real-time UIs — streaming responses, WebSockets/SSE, optimistic updates, partial rendering.
• Performance engineering experience — Core Web Vitals, bundle optimization, profiling, rendering performance.
• Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) as a regular part of your workflow — beyond inline autocomplete.
• Experience authoring durable project context for AI tools — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, Cursor rules, custom skills, or comparable artifacts that encode team conventions.
• Familiarity with plan-first / spec-first workflows when working with coding agents (plan mode, milestones, review gates) and with structured review of AI-generated code (hallucinated APIs, plausible-but-wrong logic, security regressions, prompt-injection risk in agentic flows).
• Experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or equivalent) into web applications, even at the level of one or two shipped or seriously prototyped features.
• Experience building user-facing surfaces for LLM features — streaming UIs, tool-use / function-calling interactions, structured output rendering, citation and grounding UX, regeneration and interruption flows.
• Familiarity with the TypeScript AI ecosystem (Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, LangChain.js, official OpenAI/Anthropic TS SDKs, MCP clients) or working knowledge of the Python AI ecosystem (LangChain, LlamaIndex, evaluation frameworks).
• Awareness of LLM-application concerns in production: evaluation strategies (golden datasets, regression checks, LLM-as-judge with appropriate skepticism), observability and tracing (Langfuse, LangSmith, Helicone, OTel-based), token accounting, latency budgets, caching, and content safety.
• Awareness of AI-specific risks in user-facing surfaces — prompt injection via user input or retrieved content, output validation, PII handling, and responsible-use considerations.
• Experience building internal tools, developer platforms, or operations applications at scale.
• Experience working in a large, cross-functional engineering organization — coordinating across teams, navigating shared platforms, and contributing to org-wide standards.
• Experience in media, entertainment, sports, or streaming technology is a plus but not required.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, development, and successful deployment of medium-to-large size software solutions, ensuring performance, quality, scalability, and security.
• Drive software engineering best practices, including design, code quality, security and testability within the team.
• Exhibit deep and broad technical expertise, with hands-on proficiency in key functional/specialty areas.
• Serve as a primary technical resource for the team, offering guidance on technical issues and new feature development.
• Participate in the design and delivery of features that integrate with LLM-backed services, such as streaming chat surfaces, structured-output forms, retrieval-grounded search, and tool-use interactions, partnering with senior AI-application engineers.
• Help establish and refine team practices for using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) effectively and responsibly in day-to-day development.
• Solve complex technical problems with an innovative and experimental can-do attitude grounded by advanced technical skill and technique.
• Conduct thorough code reviews, focusing on requirements, design and coding standards, readability, testability, and optimization.
• Mentor and guide the work of less experienced engineers to develop solutions.
• Identify opportunities and recommend the development or implementation of solutions to improve products or processes with each iteration.
• Document technical details for assigned features, fixes, and projects.
• Work independently with minimal guidance, applying judgment in selecting methods and techniques to resolve issues or satisfy requests.
• Make timely, informed technical decisions that moderately influence the work of team members and related projects.
• Participate in developing new technical approaches and tools.
• Communicate complex technical information effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.

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