Media Performance Engineer II, Distribution

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming our media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to enhance flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform - providing the best possible playback experience to our viewers. Media Engineering handles audio, video, & metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build and coordinate logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.

The Media Experience, Performance Engineering - Distribution Team is nested at the intersection of technology and innovation within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET). We are leading the charge in optimizing playback performance quality and shaping the future of media technology. The role on the Distribution team demands strategic planning, precise time management, seamless collaboration with diverse engineering teams, and hands-on leadership. Routine functions encompass analyzing product health, swiftly mitigating escalations, remediation attempts, meticulously curating documentation, engineering and enforcing media and CDN distribution policies while providing crucial support for live events and feature releases. In essence, the Performance Engineering teams strive to engineer seamless playback experiences and drive optimal performance across TWDC’s streaming services, leveraging state-of-the-art technology, multidisciplinary skills, and innovative problem-solving approaches to directly enhance customer experience.

Responsibilities

In the role of Media Experience Performance Engineer II on the Distribution team, your daily responsibilities will require a combination of strategic planning, time management around internal initiatives, an ability to collaborate with development, operations and engineering teams, a hands-on approach to leadership and mentoring within the larger Media Experience organization, while utilizing cross-functional skills to ensure optimal performance across the Media Experience Distribution team and Disney owned and operated streaming services.

This position offers an opportunity for personal and professional growth, providing exposure to cutting-edge technology within the realm of streaming services.

• Analyze health of products utilizing internal and third-party tooling

• Act as first responder to both internal and external delivery escalations

• Execute mitigation steps to limit windows of impact

• Curate documentation for issue tracking and impact analysis

• Manage distribution policies using internal tooling

• Support live events, high-profile content sunrises and feature releases

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree

• 3+ years of experience in streaming media, content distribution, or video technology.

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Live Video Streaming Systems, including encoding, distribution, and playback.

• Understanding of the live and VOD content delivery life cycle – “glass to glass”.

• Exposure to implementing distributed systems with a microservice architecture.

• Experience in a production environment, preferably in a high-availability, large-scale setup on AWS or another public cloud.

• Familiarity with video compression, codec standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1), encoding bitrate ladders, and rate control.

• Good communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work in a team.

• Basic quantitative, analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and decision-making skills.

• Exposure to interfacing with OTT and mobile devices (Roku, Game Consoles, Apple TV, Android, iOS, etc.).

• Awareness of network-level tools; ThousandEyes, Kentik, Catchpoint.

• Familiarity with data visualization tools; Grafana, Datadog, Kibana, Splunk.

• Basic understanding of CDNs and their relation to network operations, transit, and peering.

• Exposure to designing and maintaining documentation.

• Familiarity with ticketing and tracking systems like JIRA and Confluence.

• Exposure to working with third-party services and device manufacturers.

• Basic understanding of technical project management.

• Ability to contribute to independent research.

• Analytical mindset.

• Basic proficiency in data structures (SQL).

• Demonstrated ability to deliver results through ambiguity.

• Basic knowledge of video streaming quality metrics and technical aspects affecting the viewer experience.

• Ability to assist in identifying and resolving performance issues to optimize end-user experience.

• Exposure to tooling used to analyze subscriber data, trends, and performance metrics.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to Live and VOD Video Streaming Systems, with basic understanding of encoding, distribution and playback through previous work experience.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $117,998 to $158,290 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $112,586 to $151,030; and the hiring range for this position in San Francisco, California is $123,328 to $165,440 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.