Distinguished Product Software Engineer (VP level)

About the role

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is a global organization dedicated to advancing the technological backbone of Disney's media business. The team combines technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive innovation.

Here are a few reasons why you'd love working here: Building the future of Disney's media, reaching, scaling, and impacting millions of people globally, and innovation through groundbreaking products and techniques.

Responsibilities

• Guide technical strategy and vision for Sports, News, and developer platform, driving innovation and integration across teams.
• Drive system stability and reliability by implementing robust monitoring, automated alerting, and proactive incident response strategies to minimize downtime and ensure consistent performance.
• Architect for global scale and cost—optimize latency, availability, throughput, and observability; ensure the overall system is coherent and evolvable.
• Elevate platform standards for APIs, coding practices, CI/CD, model monitoring, governance, and responsible AI so teams ship faster with higher quality.
• Mentor and multiply senior/staff/principal engineers; drive cross-alliance design reviews and decision records; cultivate a culture of innovation and learning.
• Partner with product & editorial to translate live-sports moments, breaking-news dynamics, and evergreen discovery into ML problems with clear success metrics.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronic Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 15+ years building large-scale consumer systems
• Experience at technology companies known for advanced AI capabilities and large-scale consumer-facing products
• Exceptional communication skills, including the ability to simplify complex technical concepts for diverse audiences
• Wide-ranging experience covering everything from infrastructure to native applications
• Ability to dive deep technically while holding the end-to-end architecture
• Demonstrated track record setting engineering standards and leading cross-functional initiatives at org scale
• Advanced proficiency in API design, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native infrastructure
• Experience managing technical roadmaps and aligning cross-functional teams to organizational objectives

Preferred Qualifications

• Background with sports, news, or event-centric products and their scale/traffic patterns
• Proven ability to define and govern platform-wide standards and influence alliance-level
• Demonstrated success in mentoring and developing senior engineering talent across multiple teams
• Experience machine learning to drive user engagement and retention in large-scale consumer platforms

Pay

The hiring range for this position in California is $304,900 to $408,900 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.