Backend Streaming Engineer II - Watch Platform

5014 Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC; Connecticut; On-site; USD 115,000 - 154,000; Full time

Job summary

5014 Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is seeking a backend engineer to build and maintain the APIs powering ESPN’s watch experiences across apps, web, and devices. You will contribute to scalable distributed systems, live event support, and reliable delivery of streaming content.

You will work with product and platform teams to ensure performance, observability, and operational excellence. The role requires 3+ years in backend Java development, cloud-native AWS, and modern CI/CD practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of experience developing backend systems or APIs in Java (Spring Boot preferred).
• Familiarity with cloud-native development, particularly in AWS (ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, S3).
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability stacks (DataDog, New Relic, CloudWatch).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git, build systems (TeamCity, Jenkins), and containerized deployments.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, caching strategies, and performance optimization.
• Comfortable working in high-stakes environments with live event traffic and tight SLAs.
• Agentic AI development tools (Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate workflows.

Responsibilities

• Be involved in requirements gathering, analysis, design, testing, deployment, and maintenance of backend systems and APIs.
• Collaborate and troubleshoot with the team on high-traffic web services, distributed systems, and caching layers.
• Design scalable, reliable solutions for live streaming and watch platforms across platforms.
• Participate in code reviews and follow best practices for testing, deployment, and operations.
• Support on-call rotations and incident response for mission-critical streaming services.

Skills

Java

Cloud AWS

REST APIs

CI/CD

Observability

Distributed systems

On-call support

AI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code)

Code reviews

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or related

Tools

TeamCity

Jenkins

DataDog

New Relic

CloudWatch

Job description

5014 Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is seeking a backend engineer to build and maintain the APIs powering ESPN’s watch experiences across apps, web, and devices. You will contribute to scalable distributed systems, live event support, and reliable delivery of streaming content.

You will work with product and platform teams to ensure performance, observability, and operational excellence. The role requires 3+ years in backend Java development, cloud-native AWS, and modern CI/CD practices.