Lead Product Software Engineer

ESPN; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 166,000 - 232,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Looker/LookML experience

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology seeks a lead engineer to build scalable analytics platforms used by Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. You will enable AI-driven, natural-language dashboards and insights while shaping architecture across frontend, services, and data layers.

You will mentor engineers, drive performance and quality, and partner with product, design, and data teams to turn complex questions into durable systems. This role is based in major U.S.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software or Electrical Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience delivering agentic analytics or data products built on LLMs or agents.
• A track record of leading full-stack web applications and data-heavy dashboards.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver agentic analytics experiences including natural-language dashboard authoring and AI-assisted insights.
• Lead projects end-to-end with product, design, and data teams; define architecture and API contracts.
• Build across the stack: React frontend, Node.js/Python/Java services, and data integration layers.
• Improve performance, scalability, and code quality with testing and observability.
• Mentor engineers and drive cross-team architectural decisions.

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Python

Java

Looker/LookML

Snowflake

Databricks

Job description

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:

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.

About The Role

We're making AI the fastest path from a business question to a trusted answer. You'll be a lead engineer on the team building the analytics platform that people across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN use to understand the business, from an analyst checking a metric to executives deciding what to do next. Increasingly they get there by asking in natural language and letting AI agents assemble, explain, and explore the data, with people in the loop on what ships.

The platform spans a performance‑tuned React front end, the services behind it, and an integration layer over our BI and data‑warehouse stack, purpose‑built so that data‑rich dashboards load fast, stay trustworthy, and can be assembled and changed through configuration rather than one‑off code.

You'll lead major projects across the stack and set the technical direction for the work you own, partnering with the initiative's principal engineer on overall architecture. You'll raise the bar on quality and performance and work at the seam between product, design, and data and analytics partners, turning ambiguous questions into durable systems.

Responsibilities

AI and agentic analytics

Design and deliver agentic analytics experiences: natural-language and AI‑assisted dashboard authoring, agent-accessible surfaces, and AI-generated insights with human‑in‑the‑loop review. Build the foundations these depend on a semantic, machine-readable representation of metrics and surfaces so agents can do what the app can, plus the evaluation and guardrails that keep AI output trustworthy.

Technical leadership and architecture

Lead projects end to end: partner with product, design, and data teams to scope ambiguous problems and distill requirements into clear design and technical specifications. Own the high‑leverage architectural decisions for the projects you lead (rendering, data fetching, caching, state, service boundaries, API contracts), document them, and guide other engineers in carrying them out.

Build across the stack

Build the full path: a responsive React front end, the Node.js (and Python or Java) services behind it, and the APIs and data‑integration layer that feed it. Evolve a configuration and schema‑driven system that lets new dashboards and metrics ship through config and CI validation rather than bespoke code, treating product surfaces as data.

Performance and scale

Engineer for dashboard-shaped traffic across client and server: optimize data fetching, caching, request batching, and progressive and streaming rendering so complex, high‑cardinality views load fast and scale to a large concurrent audience. Quality and craft Write, maintain, standardize, and enforce code quality through testing (including test‑driven development where it fits), code review, observability, and accessible, resilient UI. See work through from specification to production and ongoing operation.

Influence and mentorship

Mentor engineers at all levels, including senior engineers, through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing; build trust, set goals, and give constructive feedback. Drive the evolution of the team's practices and standards, including agentic engineering workflows that raise how fast and how well the team ships, and build cross‑team consensus for technical direction.

Basic Qualifications

• 7+ years building highly scalable, performant full-stack web applications serving millions of users and requests.
• A regular practitioner of agentic software development: AI coding agents and agent-driven workflows are a core part of how you build, and you can raise a team's effectiveness with them.
• A track record of delivering agentic analytics solutions in production: analytics or data products built on LLMs or agents (for example, natural-language querying, agent-driven insight generation, or prompt-to-dashboard).
• Expert‑level command of React, TypeScript, and JavaScript, with strong Node.js; comfortable working across the full stack, from UI through back‑end services and APIs.
• Proven track record architecting sophisticated technical changes and driving cross‑team consensus on the approach.
• Experience defining and implementing API specifications in collaboration with service and back‑end teams.
• Strong performance‑engineering fundamentals (rendering, data fetching, caching) for data-heavy or high‑traffic systems.
• Track record of owning projects beginning to end and driving complex problems to root cause and resolution.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineers, including senior engineers, by building trust and giving clear feedback.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software or Electrical Engineering, a comparable field, and/or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working proficiency in Python and/or Java for back‑end services, data tooling, or integrations.
• Shipped production React/Node.js applications with high availability and throughput on a cloud platform (e.g., AWS).
• Experience with data visualization at scale: charting, large and high-cardinality datasets, interactive and filterable dashboards.
• Familiarity with BI and data‑warehouse stacks (e.g., Looker/LookML, Snowflake, Databricks) and partnering with data and analytics teams.
• Experience with configuration-driven or schema-driven UI systems (product defined as data or "as code").
• Expert understanding of web accessibility (WCAG) fundamentals.
• Broad knowledge of web standards and emerging technologies

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $165,600.00 - $222,000.00 per year and in San Francisco, CA is $173,100.00 - $232,100.00 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.

Disclaimer

This position is with Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

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