Principal Software Engineer

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.

Our Team and Charter:

This role falls within the Core Media Technology (CMT) team in DEEP&T’s Media Engineering organization. CMT is one of our Research and Advanced Development teams whose focus is in the domain of video and audio processing that drives innovative enhancements into our video processing platform for live and on-demand video streaming delivery. Our work involves optimizing media processing, introducing new media codecs, developing quality and performance assessment frameworks and conducting innovative media R&D towards future platform capabilities for the purposes of achieving velocity, scale, and efficiency through an optimized media platform as well as redefining storytelling through innovative media experiences.

Job Summary:

You will conduct multidisciplinary research and development in video streaming for both live and on-demand use cases.

You will have the opportunity to participate in multimedia standardizations such as AOM, MPEG, IETF, and VQEG, and connect with academic research groups and conferences.

You will be designing media processing algorithms and software workflows for the purposes of achieving velocity, scale, and efficiency to further optimize our media platform.

You will collaborate cross-functionally with teams such as our studios, streaming backend, streaming delivery, client, and product teams to investigate, develop and adopt cutting-edge technologies and specifications into production.

You will be part of a team conducting innovative research and advanced development involving advanced computer vision algorithms and applied ML/AI techniques to address the tasks such as media enhancement, understanding, analysis, compression, and enhancing storytelling through innovative media experiences.

As a Principal Engineer your technical expertise will influence various codebases ensuring compatibility of practices, driving technical standards contributing to architectural best practices across the organization. You will be leading coordination for large projects and facilitating cross-team collaboration, owning complex and innovative projects that span multiple teams and components, leading documentation, architecture, and stakeholder engagement. All while regularly driving innovation and technical strategy.

Our CMT team is global, with resources from Zurich, Bangalore, throughout the US and in Beijing and coordination and collaboration across these is expected.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• Minimum of 10 years of related work experience
• Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field
• Deep Expertise in video streaming technologies (e.g. codecs, streaming packagers and distribution, playback algorithms, etc)
• Strong background in applying deep learning techniques to media processing tasks
• In-depth understanding and experience with multimedia frameworks
• A proven track record of success and demonstrable experience in research and advanced development in video coding, media processing or adjacent fields
• A proven track record of IP generation

Preferred Qualifications:

• Expertise in video coding standards such as AV1, AV2, AVC, HEVC, VVC
• Knowledge and experience in C/C++
• Knowledge and experience with Python
• Applied knowledge of Media Metadata and Processing
• gStreamer Media Framework
• Experience deploying and optimizing AI/ML models and frameworks
• Experience with building web-apps/dashboards for data visualization
• Experience with working with Dockers
• Web service development, REST APIs, XML/JSON
• Release management, continuous integration, Git/GitHub
• High load, highly scalable and distributed applications

The hiring range for this position in California is $206,400.00 to $276,700.00 per year and in North Carolina is $175,500.00 to $235,400.00 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.