Principal Product Software Engineering Manager

Job Posting Title:

Principal Product Software Engineering Manager

Req ID:

10156759

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.

As part of the Media & Metadata Acquisition and Syndication (MASS) team, we are proud to be responsible for linear, video-on-demand (VOD), and non-linear delivery (NLD) media workflows delivering thousands of Disney-owned Sports, General Entertainment, and News assets daily to service providers (MVPDs, vMVPDs, SVOD) worldwide, including Disney streaming services.

 This team manages long-form, short-form, and creative/promo content for ESPN, Disney Cables, Freeform, FX Channels, National Geographic Channels, ABC, ABC Owned and Affiliated Digital feeds, ABC National Feeds and ABC News Live Hybrid.

 It is an incredibly complex ecosystem that requires us to manage an intricate integration platform for media asset ingest, transformation, normalization, packaging, scheduling, and global distribution to downstream content providers in the exact format they expect for their play-out. That represents several hundred thousand hours, and several million files processed every year.

Job Summary:

We are looking for a Senior Manager to lead teams tasked to build workflows, orchestration, and tooling managing our VOD and LIVE supply chains. We seek an empathetic leader and mentor who has a successful track record in continuous improvement of high performing teams. We are eager to discover an individual with a well-rounded set of skillsets in software engineering best practices (agile), software architecture and distributed systems, microservices, APIs, reactive user interfaces, etc., and who is comfortable wearing multiple hats when needed (product ownership, architecture, development, quality assurance). An ability to make swift decisions in a dynamic context and requiring a sense of world class quality, safety, and reliability will be key for this role.

• Support the team in aligning workflows and tooling across the various supply chains for VOD and our live orchestration, including a major focus on observability and reporting.
• Mentor the team to live by design and operational principles targeted at delivering a World Class product (safe deployment of high quality, resilient, secure, and scalable distributed solutions supporting streaming to millions of subscribers).
• Lead workload, utilization, sprint allocation, and continuous improvement for your team using agile methodologies and best practices, with a focus on predictability towards milestones and deliverables.
• Contribute to the vision, architecture, design, and in some cases implementation of new features and products.
• Act as a cross-functional partner to other teams in Media Engineering and beyond, by actively participating in requirements gathering, wide architecture discussions, and software engineering best practices, among others.
• Coach your team on the path of career enhancement and advancement.
• Align solutions and develop synergies with other departments within Media Engineering.
• Champion automation and unification of solutions, tooling, and processes, with a vision to globalize our solutions beyond just US/domestic needs.
• Accountable for a capital and operational budget.
• Ability to go hands-on with the team, in particular during incidents and critical escalations

Responsibilities:

• Design, Develop, and Maintain Java, Spring Boot, and various messaging services (SQS, Kafka) services which integrate with various media supply chain systems and backends.
• Oversee development of intuitive and REACTive user interfaces.
• Troubleshoot code and end-end workflows for the critical production issues and propose design changes required to fix these issues.
• Help define engineering standards and provide technical mentorship to the team.
• Create architecture and design proposals for new projects.
• Own large and complex features of the workflows and analyze product requirements.
• Collaborate with product, program, platform, infrastructure, and other engineers.
• Improve observability for end-end workflows using monitoring, logging, and alerting technologies.
• Drive improvements for our continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines.
• Modernize existing workflows using latest technologies.
• Perform code reviews and propose best practices for driving efficiencies in software development.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Engineer, develop, deploy, and maintain integration layers and user interfaces for our media ingest & distribution infrastructure

Cultivate relationships across engineering and technical teams in a complex ecosystem

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent
• 10 years of experience building world class production software with REACT user interfaces, Java, Spring, JPA, REST, HTTP/HTTPS, AWS, Relational and NoSQL databases, or equivalent.
• 5 years as a manager/leader of high performing teams, including asynchronously supporting distributed and remote reports or teams, including contractors
• Experience with server-side applications, microservices, and serverless is required.
• In-depth experience in Object-Oriented Programming, Services Oriented Architecture, and Data structures required.
• Highly familiar with Agile methodologies and best practices, with a focus on continuous improvement and high predictability.
• Demonstrated experience with CICD and Test Automation.
• Excellent verbal and written communicator with the ability to interact with senior and executive leadership at TWDC on a daily basis.
• Comfortable and available in a 365x24x7 support environment.
• Bachelor’s degree required

Tech stack/Languages:

Java, Python, Javascript (Node.js/Vue.js), AWS Services

Preferred:

• Masters degree
• Expertise in Media Workflows and Media Supply Chain, including broadcast/VOD playout systems.
• Knowledge of broadcast and VOD standards.

Job Posting Segment:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Job Posting Primary Business:

Media Engineering

Primary Job Posting Category:

Product Software Engineering

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Bangalore, India

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Date Posted:

2026-07-31