Senior Product Software Engineer (Kotlin)

Job Summary:

Department Overview

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.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

Job Summary

The Disney Media Player Engineering team mission is to design video streaming playback solutions in collaboration with encoding, packaging, and delivery teams to optimize the Disney streaming technology stack for the best streaming experience possible on all platforms.

Our team is seeking someone who can fill the role of a Senior Product Software Engineer to create a feature rich standard streaming media playback library on Android devices. Our intention is to design and develop a layered architecture for media playback which can span all the Disney direct-to-consumer brands like Disney+, ESPN, ABC News, and Hulu. Your focus will be on collaborating with media playback teams on other platforms to ensure a consistent software architecture which delivers a best-in-class streaming experience for your viewers while providing a foundation for media playback innovation at Disney.

This is a hands-on engineering position for the Android Ecosystem using Kotlin and the Android SDK.  Based on your experience, you will work a cross-functional team of Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, Web Developers, and Content Creators to conceptualize and develop solutions that are shared across all Disney experiences. You are a person who enjoys working with other teams and technologies to understand their constraints. You enjoy the challenges presented by difficult problems and take pride in finding solutions which successfully thread the needle between design constraints, technical constraints, and the end experience of your users. You foster trust, approach problems with empathy and respect, and embrace creativity.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Design and implement solutions in collaboration with team-members for new features which integrate with various Disney media services and back-ends

• Collaborative API design with peer teams on API Services as well as front-end teams which depend on our libraries

• Research and development for media playback experiences, integration, and testing

• Participate in project estimation and resource planning.

• Ability to collaborate in a small, productive development team as well as the larger engineering organization

• Troubleshoot and resolve issues, problems, and errors encountered across our various platforms

• Ability to collaborate in a small, productive development team as well as ability to work independently

Required Experience and Skills

• At least 5 years of industry experience using Kotlin and the Android SDK

• Proficiency with Reactive Programming and Dependency Injection

• Well-versed in different architectural patterns (MVI/MVVM or equivalent)

• Able to demonstrate experience in the full lifecycle of software development. Early stage, maintenance, and end of life.

• Knowledgeable in programming paradigms including Object Oriented and Reactive

• Write efficient, reliable, and maintainable code whether implementing improvements, user-facing features, or fixing defects – through collaboration with senior team members.

• Experience with unit test frameworks and continuous integration systems

• Strong verbal and written communication skills

• Motivated self-starter with the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies

Preferred Experience and Skills

• Comfortable using common Android libraries such as Dagger 2 / Hilt, RxJava2, Groupie

• A deep understanding of many aspects of the Android SDK such as Activity and Fragment lifecycles, thread management, custom views, and animations

• Experience using performance evaluation tools such as Android Profiler 

• Knowledgeable about maintaining a large, modularized codebase

• Familiarity with Android TV / Amazon Fire TV development

• Experience with streaming video, codecs, and DRM

• Experience with Kotlin, Java, Android SDK, Dependency Injection, Gradle, Databases, Reactive paradigms, Coroutines, Jetpack Compose

Required Education

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or equivalent experience

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles is $141,900 to $190,300 per year and in New York is $148,700 to $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.