Lead Software Engineer - Data Streaming/Integration Platforms

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

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:

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to help build, enhance, and scale our cloud‑based messaging and integration platforms. In this role, you will design, develop, and support event‑streaming solutions at scale. You will also build and maintain custom microservices based applications that provide platform administration, operational tooling, and integrations with enterprise products and third‑party systems.

Beyond hands-on development, you will serve as a key technical leader—setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, conducting code reviews, and championing best practices in software development, cost‑efficient architecture, and maintainable design.

This role offers the opportunity to shape core platform strategy, lead complex distributed systems engineering, and collaborate across the organization to deliver high‑quality, reliable, and scalable products.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Build, enhance, and support highly scalable, reliable, and cost‑optimized cloud‑based event‑streaming and integration platforms.
• Use Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines to deploy and manage cloud resources.
• Enhance and support Spring Boot/Java microservices based applications for administration and operation of messaging platform.
• Design, develop and support integration services connecting enterprise products and third‑party systems.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and conduct code reviews.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to deliver high‑impact solutions.
• Ensure performance, reliability, and observability across the platforms.
• Champion engineering excellence in areas such as IaC, microservices design, price-performance optimization, and observability.
• Continuously improve platform automation, monitoring, and self‑service capabilities.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering with a strong focus on Java, Infrastructure as Code
• Extensive hands-on experience designing and supporting cloud solutions in AWS, including container orchestration using Amazon EKS
• Extensive “Infrastructure as Code” experience, with advanced proficiency in Terraform for provisioning and automating cloud resources
• Extensive hands-on experience in administrating, deploying, and optimizing messaging platform, especially Apache Kafka
• Proficient in Spring Boot / Java development, with a strong focus on microservices architecture.
• Strong problem-solving skills with a proactive approach to identifying and resolving issues.
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience working across teams.
• Comfortable working in a geographically distributed team.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems preferred
• Familiarity with Amazon Q or similar generative AI‑assistant for cloud development, troubleshooting, and code generation.
• Familiarity with Azure and GCP cloud services, including compute, networking, IAM, and container orchestration.
• Familiarity with multi‑region, high‑availability, or disaster recovery architectures.

Required Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience