Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Technology is at the heart of Disney's past, present, and future. 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.

Here are a few reasons why we think you'd love working here:

• Building the future of Disney's media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney's technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company's brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Disney's DE&E Cost Management team manages one of the largest and most complex cloud and technology spend portfolios in the entertainment industry, spanning AWS, GCP, Azure, and a broad ecosystem of enterprise software vendors. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will build and operate the data infrastructure, automation, and AI-driven tooling that gives Disney's engineering and finance leaders real-time visibility into a large-scale annual cloud and technology portfolio.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who understands cloud infrastructure, billing data, data platforms, and applied AI. You will help turn complex cost signals into trusted, actionable intelligence at Disney scale, design and build internal FinOps engineering platforms, mentor junior engineers, and serve as a go-to technical resource for cost visibility, attribution, and optimization across DE&E.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain AI-driven cost intelligence platforms, contributing to architecture decisions for retrieval-augmented generation workflows, evaluation and quality frameworks, guardrails, rate limiting, secure access patterns, and cross-account model integration.
• Own deployment and infrastructure patterns for production services, including containerized workloads, CI/CD pipelines, secure networking, certificate management, load balancing, and reliable service delivery.
• Design, build, and maintain cost data pipelines that ingest, transform, reconcile, and serve billing and usage data from cloud providers and enterprise software vendors, with a focus on data quality, freshness, reliability, and stakeholder trust.
• Extend AI spend tracking and attribution capabilities as AI and machine learning workloads scale, including usage metering, cost allocation, and reporting for emerging AI services and platforms.
• Build and maintain optimization automation for rightsizing, idle resource detection, commitment coverage monitoring, and anomaly alerting.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to team engineering practices, including CI/CD standards, code review, and operational quality standards.
• Partner with Cloud Engineering, Platform Engineering, Finance, Product, and Architecture teams to embed cost awareness into engineering workflows, developer platforms, and operational practices.
• Define and track engineering KPIs, including pipeline reliability, data reconciliation, freshness, automation impact, and cost avoidance. Contribute engineering-driven insights to team and leadership reporting, budget cycles, and planning.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Minimum 5 years' experience in software engineering, cloud or platform engineering, data engineering, or a technical FinOps role. In-depth expertise and a track record of independently owning programs and multiple components with minimal guidance.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and serving as a go-to technical resource.
• Strong hands-on AWS experience, including containers, managed Kubernetes, CI/CD, networking, certificates, load balancing, and DNS. Familiarity with GCP and/or Azure is a plus.
• Proficiency in Python, strong SQL skills, and experience building and operating production data pipelines using Spark, Databricks, Airflow, or equivalent technologies.
• Hands-on experience with cloud billing data, cost management APIs, and cloud cost constructs such as compute pricing, commitment discounts, enterprise agreements, and usage-based allocation models.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to align cross-functional stakeholders and translate technical findings into clear narratives for engineering leads and finance partners.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Production AI/ML application experience, including retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation and quality frameworks, and LLM cost or usage tracking.
• Experience with modern infrastructure and delivery tooling, such as Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD platforms, and infrastructure as code.
• FinOps Foundation Certified Practitioner or equivalent experience, with familiarity with cloud cost data standards and allocation practices.
• Experience operationalizing FinOps tooling, cloud cost management platforms, and developer-facing cost visibility integrations.
• Experience designing tagging governance frameworks at enterprise scale.
• Background in large-scale media, streaming, or entertainment technology environments.

What does success look like?

• AI-driven cost intelligence tooling is hardened, reliable, safely operated at scale, and adopted by engineering and finance stakeholders across DE&E.
• Cost data pipelines run reliably, reconcile cleanly, and are trusted by finance and engineering stakeholders without manual intervention.
• Optimization automations are live, monitored, and delivering measurable, repeatable cost avoidance.
• Engineering teams can self-serve cost insights through reliable tooling and clear documentation, reducing ad hoc support needs.
• The role becomes a trusted technical resource for cost attribution, anomaly detection, optimization, and infrastructure cost questions, with work that informs planning and leadership reporting.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $148,700 - $199,400 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.