If you’re a software engineer looking to build technology for one of the world’s most recognized entertainment companies, this could be an exciting opportunity. The Walt Disney Company is hiring a Software Engineer in Glendale, California, offering a competitive salary of $97,500–$130,700 per year. The role is suited for professionals who enjoy solving technical problems, collaborating with engineering teams, and contributing to technology that supports Disney’s products and experiences.
Job Overview
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Company Name | The Walt Disney Company |
| Role | Software Engineer |
| Qualification | Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field; relevant software development experience |
| Job Location | Glendale, California, USA |
| Salary | $97,500–$130,700 USD per year |
| Work Type | On-site / Hybrid, depending on team requirements |
| Job Type | Full-time |
| Job Level | Entry Level |
| Industry | Entertainment & Technology |
Job Description
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.
Join the Observability & Insights group and help build the telemetry, monitoring, and insights platforms that keep Disney’s large-scale streaming services reliable — including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, ABC News, and related products.
As a Software Engineer I, you will implement well-scoped features, fix bugs, and improve tooling under the guidance of senior engineers. You’ll contribute to metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting workflows that help engineering teams across Disney Streaming understand system health and respond to incidents faster.
This is an ideal role for an early-career engineer who wants hands-on experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and observability at scale. You’ll grow through code reviews, design discussions, pair programming, and on-call shadowing — while delivering real value to a platform team that reduces operational toil through automation and modern developer workflows.
Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:
Implement and Maintain Observability Features
- Develop, test, and document features within existing observability codebases (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, and telemetry pipelines).
- Fix bugs and address technical debt in assigned components with support from senior teammates.
- Write clean, readable, and well-tested code that follows team standards and integrates with established observability frameworks.
- Learn and apply patterns for high-volume, low-latency telemetry ingestion and storage.
Improve Visibility for Service Teams
- Assist in instrumenting services and validating telemetry quality (metrics, logs, traces) alongside partner engineering teams.
- Build and update dashboards, reports, and visualizations that surface system health and operational trends.
- Help tune alerts and reduce noise under guidance from senior engineers and incident response partners.
Learn Platform Engineering Practices
- Participate in code reviews — both giving and receiving constructive feedback.
- Contribute to technical design discussions for small-to-medium features; document your work for maintainability and team onboarding.
- Gain exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) through guided implementation tasks.
- Shadow on-call rotations and incident response workflows to build operational awareness.
Collaborate and Grow
- Break down assigned work into clear tasks, ask questions early, and communicate progress and blockers proactively.
- Partner with teammates across Observability & Insights and service engineering teams to deliver incremental improvements.
- Participate in team rituals: standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
- Develop foundational skills in reliability engineering concepts: SLIs, SLOs, post-incident reviews, and blameless culture.
Basic Qualifications:
- Proficiency in at least one backend or systems programming language: Go or Python (coursework, internships, and personal projects count).
- Foundational understanding of software development practices: version control (Git), unit testing, debugging, and working within an existing codebase.
- Basic familiarity with cloud computing concepts and interest in learning AWS and Kubernetes in production environments.
- Introductory understanding of observability concepts: metrics, logs, tracing, and alerting — or strong motivation to learn them quickly.
- Ability to communicate clearly, accept feedback, and collaborate effectively in a distributed engineering team.
Preferred Qualifications:
- 0–2 years of professional software engineering experience, or completion of a relevant internship, co-op, or new-graduate program with demonstrated project work.
- Internship, co-op, or project experience related to observability, SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering.
- Exposure to observability tools or standards: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, or similar.
- Experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, or event-driven architectures (academic, internship, or side projects).
- Contributions to open source, hackathons, or personal projects that demonstrate curiosity and initiative.
- Coursework or experience with databases, streaming systems (e.g., Kafka), or CI/CD pipelines.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and a growth mindset toward modern engineering practices.
Required Education:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a comparable field of study, or equivalent work experience.
Selection Process
- Submit your online application and resume.
- Recruiter reviews your qualifications and experience.
- Participate in an initial recruiter screening.
- Complete technical or coding assessments, if required.
- Interview with the hiring manager and engineering team.
- Complete additional interview rounds, as applicable.
- Receive the final hiring decision and offer.
How to Apply
- Visit The Walt Disney Company’s official careers website.
- Search for the Software Engineer position in Glendale, California.
- Review the complete job description and requirements.
- Click Apply and create or sign in to your candidate account.
- Upload your updated resume and provide the requested information.
- Submit your application before the position closes.
- Monitor your email for updates from the recruiting team.
