Playback Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Job Posting Title:

Product Software Engineer II

Req ID:

10154688

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.

Job Summary:

The Watch Fleet is responsible for building playback experiences across all of the brands at The Walt Disney Company (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, Marvel NatGeo, etc.). We are seeing a Product Software Engineer II to join the DMX-JS Squad. As a developer on the team, you will contribute to building watch experiences across JavaScript based clients (Web, BBD, and Chromecast). You will write clean, well-tested TypeScript and JavaScript, collaborate with senior engineers on architectural decisions, and participate actively in code review across the team's shared monorepo. Day-to-day work spans a wide range of playback concerns - UI controls, Chromecast sender and receiver behavior, analytics and telemetry instrumentation, accessibility, and performance - across multiple brands and device targets simultaneously. This role is well-suited to an engineer who is comfortable working in a large, shared codebase, takes ownership of their work end-to-end, and thrives in an async-first, high-autonomy engineering culture.

Responsibilities:

• Implement and maintain video playback features across Web, Chromecast, and Browser Based Devices including player controls, overlays, and UI components within a shared TypeScript/JavaScript monorepo
• Diagnose and resolve production bugs across multiple brand properties (Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, Disney Now, ABC News) up to and including P1-severity incidents requiring independent root-cause analysis
• Develop and maintain Chromecast sender and receiver functionality, ensuring playback parity and correct behavior across cast sessions including audio/subtitle selection, scrubbing, and error handling
• Build and support Browser Based Device (BBD) playback experiences, accounting for platform-specific input models, performance constraints, and rendering differences across device categories
• Write clean, well-tested code with appropriate unit and integration test coverage; participate in and contribute to the team's Playwright end-to-end test suite
• Contribute to team-wide code review across platform, core-ui, and brand UI packages, providing constructive feedback and maintaining code quality standards across the monorepo
• Instrument and maintain analytics and telemetry integrations (QoE, Conviva, Adobe, DCF) to ensure accurate playback event tracking across platforms and devices
• Support accessibility requirements including keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and caption/subtitle rendering across all supported surfaces
• Collaborate with senior engineers on architectural decisions, RFC discussions, and cross-brand platform initiatives
• Participate in on-call or incident response rotations, helping triage and resolve production playback issues across brands as they arise
• Work closely with QA, product, and partner teams to validate features, reproduce reported issues, and ensure delivery against roadmap commitments

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent training or work experience
• 3+ years of experience in software engineering
• Strong TypeScript and modern JavaScript, including ESM and CJS module systems and interoperability
• Experience building or maintaining full-stack web applications - SSR frameworks, REST APIs, relational databases
• Hands-on experience with AWS services, including S3, CloudFront, RDS, and CloudWatch
• Experience building or consuming CI/CD pipelines - GitHub Actions, release automation, versioning and publish workflows
• Comfort working with Infrastructure-as-Code tooling, Terraform preferred
• Ability to independently ramp on an existing production system using code, documentation, and architectural context as primary resources
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; this team works async-first through PRs, RFCs, and GitHub discussions

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building developer-facing tooling or platform infrastructure - systems built for engineers rather than end users
• SDK authorship experience - TypeScript generics, type inference, versioning, ESM/CJS compatibility, Vite and Webpack plugin development
• Familiarity with feature flagging systems such as LaunchDarkly and runtime configuration or tag-resolution patterns
• Background in runtime deployment, CDN-backed package distribution, or versioned release automation
• Experience with web video player technology - MSE, EME, HLS, DASH - or streaming platform engineering
• React and component library development experience
• Experience with observability tooling - CloudWatch, dashboards, alerting, and metric instrumentation

#disneytech

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $123,000 to $165,000 and in Los Angeles, CA is $117,500 to $157,500 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.

Job Posting Segment:

PE - Streaming Frontend

Job Posting Primary Business:

PE - Streaming Frontend - App Foundations

Primary Job Posting Category:

Product Software Engineering

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

New York, NY, USA

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

USA - CA - 1200 Grand Central Ave

Date Posted:

2026-07-08