Product Software Engineer II

Job Title: Watch Experience Delivery Team Member

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney's media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company's media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.

As a member of the Watch Experience Delivery team, you will help build and support the backend services and APIs that power ESPN's watch and streaming experiences across platforms including the ESPN app, ESPN.com, connected TV devices, and partner platforms. The team is responsible for delivering personalized and scalable watch experiences for millions of users, supporting live events, replays, highlights, multiview experiences, stream menus, and other critical streaming workflows.

In this role, you will:

• 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 your technical and professional skills through mentorship, feedback, and hands-on experience with modern distributed backend systems

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• 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.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• 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

The hiring range for this position in Bristol, CT is $114,900 - $154,100 per year, in Glendale, CA is $114,900 - $154,100 per year, in Seattle, WA is $120,300 - $161,300 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. 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.