Sr Software Engineer

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology (DEEP&T) 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.

About the role

Join our Business Operations engineering team as a Senior Software Engineer and become a core driver of organizational efficiency. You will play a key role in the development, maintenance, and enhancement of our critical application portfolio. In this role, you will leverage your deep technical expertise to deliver immediate impact, owning the end-to-end development of complex, medium-to-large-scale features and resolving high-priority system defects. You will act as a go-to technical authority, actively mentoring peers, defining and championing engineering best practices, and contributing to architectural decision-making.

A growing portion of the team's roadmap involves surfaces that interface with large language models (LLMs) — assistive flows, summarization, search, and tool-use experiences embedded into our internal platforms. This role is an opportunity for a strong frontend engineer to grow into that work alongside more senior AI-application practitioners on the team.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Expertise
  • Own the design, development, and successful deployment of medium-to-large size software solutions, ensuring performance, quality, scalability, and security.
  • Drive software engineering best practices, including design, code quality, security and testability within the team.
  • Exhibit deep and broad technical expertise, with hands-on proficiency in key functional/specialty areas.
  • Serve as a primary technical resource for the team, offering guidance on technical issues and new feature development.
  • Participate in the design and delivery of features that integrate with LLM-backed services. For example streaming chat surfaces, structured-output forms, retrieval-grounded search, and tool-use interactions, partnering with senior AI-application engineers on the team.
  • Help establish and refine team practices for using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) effectively and responsibly in day-to-day development.
• Execution & Impact
  • Solve complex technical problems with an innovative and experimental can-do attitude grounded by advanced technical skill and technique.
  • Conduct thorough code reviews, focusing on requirements, design and coding standards, readability, testability, and optimization.
  • Mentor and guide the work of less experienced engineers to develop solutions.
  • Identify opportunities and recommend the development or implementation of solutions to improve products or processes with each iteration.
  • Document technical details for assigned features, fixes, and projects.
• Autonomy & Influence
  • Work independently with minimal guidance, applying judgment in selecting methods and techniques to resolve issues or satisfy requests.
  • Make timely, informed technical decisions that moderately influence the work of team members and related projects.
  • Participate in developing new technical approaches and tools.
  • Communicate complex technical information effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Requirements

• Basic Qualifications
  • 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking.
  • Ability to write clean, maintainable, and scalable code.
  • Strong proficiency in React.js and its ecosystem (Hooks, Context API, React Router, etc.).
  • Experience with state management libraries (Redux etc).
  • Knowledge of TypeScript for better type safety and scalability.
  • Understanding of modern UI/UX principles and component-driven development.
  • Strong experience with Node.js, Express.js, or NestJS for building APIs.
  • Proficiency in RESTful APIs and GraphQL development.
  • Knowledge of authentication & authorization (JWT, OAuth, OpenID).
  • Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
  • Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
  • Understanding of testing frameworks (Jest, Mocha, Cypress, JUnit).
• Preferred Qualifications
  • Frontend depth and platform experience
    • Experience with server-side rendering and modern React frameworks (Next.js, Remix) or comparable meta-frameworks.
    • Experience building or contributing to a shared component library or design system at scale.
    • Experience with real-time UIs — streaming responses, WebSockets/SSE, optimistic updates, partial rendering.
    • Performance engineering experience — Core Web Vitals, bundle optimization, profiling, rendering performance.
  • AI-assisted development
    • Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) as a regular part of your workflow — beyond inline autocomplete.
    • Experience authoring durable project context for AI tools — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, Cursor rules, custom skills, or comparable artifacts that encode team conventions.
    • Familiarity with plan-first / spec-first workflows when working with coding agents (plan mode, milestones, review gates) and with structured review of AI-generated code (hallucinated APIs, plausible-but-wrong logic, security regressions, prompt-injection risk in agentic flows).
  • AI application exposure (growth-area; not required)
    • Experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or equivalent) into web applications, even at the level of one or two shipped or seriously prototyped features.
    • Experience building user-facing surfaces for LLM features — streaming UIs, tool-use / function-calling interactions, structured output rendering, citation and grounding UX, regeneration and interruption flows.
    • Familiarity with the TypeScript AI ecosystem (Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, LangChain.js, official OpenAI/Anthropic TS SDKs, MCP clients) or working knowledge of the Python AI ecosystem (LangChain, LlamaIndex, evaluation frameworks).
    • Awareness of LLM-application concerns in production: evaluation strategies (golden datasets, regression checks, LLM-as-judge with appropriate skepticism), observability and tracing (Langfuse, LangSmith, Helicone, OTel-based), token accounting, latency budgets, caching, and content safety.
    • Awareness of AI-specific risks in user-facing surfaces — prompt injection via user input or retrieved content, output validation, PII handling, and responsible-use considerations.
  • Domain & ways of working
    • Experience building internal tools, developer platforms, or operations applications at scale.
    • Experience working in a large, cross-functional engineering organization — coordinating across teams, navigating shared platforms, and contributing to org-wide standards.
    • Experience in media, entertainment, sports, or streaming technology is a plus but not required.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.

Pay

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $148,700.00 to $199,400.00 per year, and in Glendale, CA is $141,900.00 to $190,300.00 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.