Senior Product Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company; Bristol, Northern (CT, KY); Hybrid; USD 139,000 - 186,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus and long-term incentive units

Medical benefits

Full benefits

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company’s Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology team in Bristol, CT seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build and maintain ESPN's live sports platform services using Spring Boot, MongoDB, and Kafka. You will own features end-to-end and mentor others.

You will join a diverse group focused on performance, scalability, and reliability, collaborate across teams, and contribute to architectural decisions while delivering world-class sports experiences.

Qualifications

• 5+ years relevant industry experience.
• Strong proficiency in backend platform development and Java.
• Experience with microservices, RESTful APIs, and messaging/streaming (Kafka).

Responsibilities

• Design and develop platform services within a distributed system delivering live sports data.
• Own and operate services in production — monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to solve performance, scalability, caching, and resiliency challenges.
• Mentor junior/mid-level engineers through code reviews and guidance.
• Contribute to architectural direction through reviews and research.

Skills

Backend development

Java

Microservices

Kafka

CI/CD pipelines

Databases

Cloud

RESTful APIs

Communication

End-to-end ownership

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Tools

GitLab Pipelines

GitHub Actions

TeamCity

Datadog

Grafana

Splunk

Terraform

CloudFormation

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:

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 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:

As aSenior Software Engineer, you will be part of a diverse and talented organization focused on building and maintaining complex sports platform services and applications for ESPN. You will be a key contributor on a team creating the world's #1 sports products, working with modern server-side platform frameworks and services such as Spring Boot, MongoDB, and Apache Kafka. You will design, build, and own significant features and services end-to-end, mentor junior engineers, and drive technical quality across the codebase.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Design and develop platform services and features within a complex distributed system that delivers live sports data to Web, Mobile, and Living Room devices

Own and operate services in production — monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response for the systems you build

Collaborate cross-functionally with other engineering teams to solve complex problems, considering performance, scalability, caching, resiliency, and flexibility for expanding product requirements

Mentor and elevate junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance

Contribute to technical direction by participating in architectural reviews, proposing improvements, and researching emerging technologies

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years relevant industry experience
• Strong proficiency in backend platform development technologies and principles
• Strong understanding of software architectural patterns (microservices, event-driven, RESTful APIs)
• Experience with Cloud-based architecture and deployment
• Strong proficiency in Java or other JVM languages; familiarity with Go, Rust, or other system-level languages a plus
• Experience with messaging/streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and task automation (GitLab Pipelines, GitHub Actions, TeamCity)
• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL database technologies (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra)
• Strong communication skills, attention to detail, and ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment
• Demonstrated ability to own features end-to-end from design through production support

Preferred Qualifications

• Understanding of AWS services (e.g., CloudWatch, ECS/Fargate, EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS)
• Experience with observability tooling (Datadog, Grafana, Splunk, or similar)
• Experience with GraphQL APIs
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• AI and LLM knowledge
• Experience working in sports media, live data systems, or high-throughput real-time platforms

Required Education

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or relevant technical field, such as: AI and Robotics; Application Development; Applied Computer Science; Computer and Information Science; Computer Engineering; Computer Information Systems; Computer Information Technology; Computer Programming; Computer Science Engineering in Robotics; Computer Systems; Cybersecurity; Electronic/Electrical Engineering; Informatics; Information Security; Information Systems; Information Technology; Machine Learning; Management Information Systems; Network Engineering; Software Design; Software Development; Software Engineering; Web Development; Applied Mathematics

#TECHATDISNEY

The hiring range for this position in Bristol, CT is $138,900 - $186,200 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.