Software Engineer II - AI Insights

ESPN; New York (NY); On-site; USD 125,000 - 167,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology in New York, NY seeks a Software Engineer II to build AI‑driven, autonomous systems for streaming reliability and compliance. You will transform telemetry and signals into automated detection and root-cause analysis, partnering with product and platform teams to embed intelligence into operations.

You’ll contribute to end‑to‑end features, drive system design reviews, and own components in a fast‑paced, AI‑native SRE environment, delivering value

Qualifications

• Backend focus with AI-powered or data-driven apps and scalable APIs.
• Experience with AWS and cloud architecture for reliability.
• Practical AI/ML knowledge: agentic workflows or traditional ML.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate production AI-driven observability systems.
• Build AI capabilities for real-time health and compliance monitoring.
• Develop end-to-end data pipelines transforming signals into insights.
• Create scalable APIs/services for engineering and product teams.
• Enhance infrastructure visibility and prevent non-compliant deployments.
• Collaborate across teams to embed intelligence in workflows.

Skills

Backend development

AWS

AI/ML

APIs & microservices

Git & CI/CD

Troubleshooting

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Docker

Kubernetes / AWS EKS

Datadog

Grafana

Snowflake

PySpark

Pandas

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

• 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.

The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming’s distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly.

Job Summary

As a Software Engineer II, you will design and build intelligent, AI driven systems that enhance the reliability and compliance posture of Disney's large-scale streaming infrastructure. You will develop agentic systems, machine learning models, and real‑time automation that transform telemetry, logs, and infrastructure signals into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive policy enforcement and insights.

In this role, you will contribute to the development of autonomous agents capable of reasoning over complex system behavior, identifying issues in real time, and driving faster detection and resolution across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. You will also contribute to systems that provide infrastructure visibility across a variety of Disney products, enforce compliance through preventative guardrails, correlate services to incidents for faster resolution, and quantify the impact of AI‑driven observability tools on operational outcomes. You will partner closely with engineering, product, and platform teams to embed intelligence directly into operational workflows, improving system resilience and compliance posture at scale.

As a Software Engineer II, you will deliver high quality features end‑to‑end, contribute to system design and architecture reviews, and begin owning components of production systems within a fast‑paced, AI‑native SRE engineering environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate intelligent, production‑grade systems that leverage real‑time signals and AI‑driven detection to improve the health of streaming platforms, critical services, and customer experience
• Build and scale AI‑driven capabilities including agentic AI systems powered by modern foundation models (e.g. Claude Opus/Sonnet, GPT‑4) enabling automated reasoning and decisioning, as well as predictive modeling and anomaly detection for real‑time system health and reliability
• Develop end‑to‑end data and decisioning pipelines that transform telemetry, logs, and user signals into actionable insights, automated detection, and root cause analysis
• Create and deploy scalable APIs and services that deliver predictive signals, explainability, and insights to engineering teams, operational tools, and product stakeholders
• Contribute to infrastructure visibility and compliance enforcement systems that aggregate resource data across Disney products, enable ownership‑scoped querying, and prevent non‑compliant deployments
• Partner cross‑functionally to embed intelligence into workflows (incident response, release validation, customer insights), improving speed and reducing operational overhead
• Drive innovation in observability, reliability, and developer productivity through applied AI and new approaches

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of applicable experience in backend development, including building AI‑powered or data driven applications and scalable APIs (e.g. FastAPI, Flask)
• Knowledge of AWS services and cloud architecture to inform what infrastructure characteristics should be measured and evaluated for reliability and compliance
• Practical experience in AI/ML engineering, with knowledge in at least one of the following areas:
  • Agentic Workflows: Orchestrating foundation models (GPT‑4, Claude) using frameworks like LangChain or LangGraph.
  • Traditional ML: Developing, training, or fine‑tuning models using frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proficiency with AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate engineering velocity.
• Experience with modern development practices, including version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker), and cloud‑native deployments (AWS/EKS).
• Strong understanding of API design, microservices architecture, and standard SDLC workflows.
• Strong analytical and technical skills to troubleshoot issues, perform rapid iteration and quickly come‑up with the possible solutions,
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work cross‑functionally and clearly explain complex technical concepts

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Conviva) and handling high‑volume telemetry data.
• Familiarity with large‑scale data platforms and distributed data processing tools (e.g., PySpark, Pandas, Databricks, Snowflake).
• Knowledge of prompt design, model evaluation, and fine‑tuning foundation models (GPT‑4, Claude).
• Experience implementing production‑grade systems at scale within a fast‑paced, distributed environment.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

#TECHATDISNEY

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $124,900.00 to $167,400.00 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.

To learn more about Disney’s guidelines on the use of AI for candidates, click here.

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.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION FOR EMPLOYMENT APPLICATIONS

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

Having technical issues? View the FAQs for help.