Site Reliability Engineer II

Site Reliability Engineer II

Our engineering fleet is a horizontal set of teams providing engineering services across the organization. Our specific team provides reliability engineering and operational support to backend service development teams.

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.

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.

Job Description

The Streaming SRE squad drives improvements in performance, resiliency, and operational excellence. We take a consultative approach to reliability engineering—partnering with a variety of cross-functional teams to provide guidance, automation, education, and best practices that elevate the reliability and scalability of services that support our products and brands.

We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer who will contribute to the stability and scalability of critical systems by building automation, improving operational workflows, enhancing observability, and participating in incident response. The ideal candidate has a strong understanding of distributed system fundamentals, cloud-native resources and operations, and performance optimization. This role requires a collaborative mindset and the ability to work closely with engineering teams to implement SRE principles across the organization.

Fostering innovation is a critical component to success here at Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology. Therefore, the ideal candidate will also need to be highly adaptable to changes and be able to pivot when required.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the design, implementation, and improvement of systems to enhance reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Build and maintain automation for deployment, monitoring, alerting, and operational workflows.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to implement SRE best practices, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and automated remediation.
• Support CI/CD pipelines and participate in optimizing the software delivery lifecycle.
• Develop tools, dashboards, and instrumentation to improve observability across metrics, logs, and distributed tracing.
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
• Assist in capacity planning, performance tuning, and scaling strategies for distributed systems.
• Maintain and improve Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) definitions and cloud environment configurations.
• Contribute to documentation, runbooks, architectural diagrams, and operational standards.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify reliability risks and recommend improvements.
• Participate in incident-based escalations and rotations to support high-availability production systems.
• Continuously evaluate system architecture, tools, and practices to drive operational excellence and efficiency.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 3+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or related discipline.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms – AWS (preferred), GCP, Azure.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, JavaScript, Bash, or equivalent scripting languages.
• Working knowledge of Linux or Unix-based systems.
• Experience with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.).
• Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Understand networking fundamentals, distributed systems, and system design basics.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, including the ability to diagnose complex system issues.
• An ability to work both independently and collaboratively
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic).
• Exposure to GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux).
• Experience contributing to SLO/SLI frameworks and implementing error budgets.
• Knowledge of service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd).
• Familiarity with performance testing and load testing tools.
• Experience with message queues, event-driven systems, or distributed data platforms.
• Cloud or DevOps-related certifications (AWS Associate/Specialty, GCP Professional, Kubernetes CKA/CKS).
• Experience working in large-scale enterprise environments or with distributed global teams.
• Experience using modern AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, or similar) to improve code quality, accelerate development, and enhance documentation.
• Understanding foundational AI/ML concepts, familiarity with cloud-native AI services such as model hosting, and/or ability to use AI tools to automate cloud operations tasks.

The hiring range for this position in New York City is $123,000 - $165,000. 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.