Lead Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer

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.

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join our Content Platform Engineering team, responsible for building and operating content inspection pipelines that enable intelligent analysis of media assets at scale.

In this role, you will lead the development of systems that apply computer vision and vision language models (VLMs) to video and image content, extracting fine‑grained temporal metadata such as scene boundaries, visual events, object presence, and contextual signals over time. These pipelines power automated inspection, validation, and enrichment workflows that improve content quality, operational efficiency, and downstream media discovery across Disney's global content ecosystem. You will influence architectural direction for these pipelines, partner closely with platform and domain teams, and ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and production ready.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Technical Execution and Problem Solving: Lead execution across complex and ambiguous problem spaces by translating product and business requirements into effective technical solutions.
• Write and Maintain Software Solutions : Design, write, test, and deploy high quality code to develop reliable, maintainable software solutions.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration : Partner with platform engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to align on technical approaches and ensure solutions effectively support business goals.
• Production Support : Provide production support through issue investigation, on‑call participation, and remediation of defects to ensure stable and reliable system operation.
• Engineering Quality and Best Practices: Raise engineering quality by mentoring peers and promoting strong practices in design reviews, code reviews, testing, and documentation

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years relevant industry experience
• Strong Proficiency in at least one core programming language (e.g., Java, Python)
• Experience designing and building distributed systems and APIs (REST and/or GraphQL)
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native system design
• Proven ability to understand product requirements and business needs and translate them into effective, scalable technical solutions
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies in production environments
• Expertise with full lifecycle of application development, including best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc
• Experience with a wide range of data store technologies such as MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and DynamoDB
• Experience in Agile/Scrum methodology
• Team player with strong oral and written communications skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or supporting computer vision based systems that analyze video content in production environments.
• Experience building visual search systems for video, including generating time aligned metadata, indexing it for retrieval, and supporting deep links to relevant moments within an asset.
• Experience with prompt engineering and interacting with LLMS
• Previous work experience in media or entertainment technology, particularly in content distribution and media supply chain.

Required Education

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.