Software Engineer II

Software Engineer II

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming's distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly.

Job Summary:

As a Software Engineer II, you will design and build intelligent, AI driven systems that enhance the reliability and performance of Disney's large scale streaming ecosystem. You will develop agentic systems, machine learning models, and real-time pipelines that transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive insights.

In this role, you will contribute to the development of autonomous agents capable of reasoning over complex system behavior, identifying issues in real time, and driving faster detection and resolution across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. You will partner closely with engineering, product, and platform teams to embed intelligence directly into operational workflows, improving system resilience and customer experience at scale.

You will deliver high quality features end-to-end and contribute to system design and code reviews and begin owning components of production systems within a fast paced, AI native engineering environment.

Responsibilities:

• Design and operate intelligent, production-grade systems that leverage real-time signals and AI-driven detection to improve the health of streaming platforms, critical services, and customer experience
• Build and scale AI-driven capabilities including agentic AI systems powered by modern foundation models (e.g. Claude Opus/Sonnet, GPT-4) enabling automated reasoning and decisioning, as well as predictive modeling and anomaly detection for real-time system health and reliability
• Develop end-to-end data and decisioning pipelines that transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into actionable insights, automated detection, and root cause analysis
• Create and deploy scalable APIs and services that deliver predictive signals, explainability, and insights to engineering teams, operational tools, and product stakeholders
• Partner cross-functionally to embed intelligence into workflows (incident response, release validation, customer insights), improving speed and reducing operational overhead
• Drive innovation in observability, reliability, and developer productivity through applied AI and new approaches

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 3+ years of applicable experience in backend development, including building AI-powered or data driven applications and scalable APIs (e.g. FastAPI, Flask)
• Practical experience in AI/ML engineering, with knowledge in at least one of the following areas:
• Agentic Workflows: Orchestrating foundation models (GPT-4, Claude) using frameworks like LangChain or LangGraph.
• Traditional ML: Developing, training, or fine-tuning models using frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate engineering velocity.
• Experience with modern development practices, including version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker), and cloud-native deployments (AWS/EKS).
• Strong understanding of API design, microservices architecture, and standard SDLC workflows.
• Strong analytical and technical skills to troubleshoot issues, perform rapid iteration and quickly come-up with the possible solutions,
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work cross-functionally and clearly explain complex technical concepts

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Conviva) and handling high-volume telemetry data.
• Familiarity with large-scale data platforms and distributed data processing tools (e.g., PySpark, Pandas, Databricks, Snowflake).
• Knowledge of prompt design, model evaluation, and fine-tuning foundation models (GPT-4, Claude).
• Experience implementing production-grade systems at scale within a fast-paced, distributed environment.

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA is $117,500 to $157,500 per year and in New York, NY and Seattle, WA is $123,000 to $165,000 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.