Senior Streaming Media Engineer

Job Summary:

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.

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.

Would you love to be at the forefront of shaping the future of video streaming technology? Are you passionate about video encoding technologies and optimizing video streaming systems?

As a Media Streaming Engineer at Disney, you will be part of the Media Delivery Live team, which is responsible for the entire audio and video encoding supply chain from content acquisition to delivery, consisting of an agile and responsive team of technicians that perform the daily processes and procedures of our live and on-demand video streaming products. The department’s responsibilities provide round-the-clock support for these products, ensuring proper functionality across all platforms and front-end playback scenarios. The Media Delivery Live team provides technical and engineering support for our partner products, including workflow design and implementation, incident management and system health monitoring for live streaming media orchestration and cross-team communications.

What You Will Do**

You would join a diverse and networked team that collaborates on initiatives that drive streaming video technology to the next level. What makes us different from other media streaming groups? We use innovation and technical experience to transform projects into experiences that can directly impact the happiness of our Subscribers.

This is a critical position on the Media Delivery Live team, a small team of engineers responsible for implementing, maintaining, monitoring and supporting live streaming and packaging workflows for Disney’s over-the-top video products.  It is an excellent opportunity for someone looking to advance their career in the live streaming space working in a dynamic, fast-paced, and sophisticated technical environment.  The schedule for this role would be overnights and weekends, and the perfect candidate would be a self-starter who can work with minimal direction.

When issues arise, you will be one of the first persons troubleshooting and providing solutions that ensures minimal impact to our customer’s video experience. You will also assist in the deployment and maintenance of our live encoders.  The ideal candidate would have some background in IT system administration and major background in audio/video production technologies and/or media streaming knowledge.  The ideal candidate must have strong troubleshooting skills within the entire live video streaming ecosystem, with an ability to capture and analyze issues as they occur.

Every single day is different! On any one day you might:

• Monitor live event and linear channel workflows
• Troubleshoot encoding and segmentation issues
• Independently develop and carry out engineering projects that support ever changing workflows and requirements
• Provide maintenance/support of our live encoders and packagers
• Provide training to internal team members
• Documentation of workflows and standard operation procedures
• Provide external teams with guidance related to live encoder/packaging workflows
• Identify and implement optimizations related to live encoder monitoring and alerts in our QA and production environments

Required Qualifications & Skills**

• 5+ years of progressively complex related experience
• B.S. in Computer Science, Information Technology or equivalent experience
• Ability to quickly identify and resolve issues in a time sensitive and dynamic production environment
• Excellent problem solving and analytical skills
• Strong multi-tasking abilities
• Experience writing technical documentation for consumption by both technical and non-technical people
• Comfortable acting as a technical resource to other departments to address and resolve technical issues
• Ability to work independently to solve problems in both the video and IT domains
• Strong aptitude to learn new technical concepts
• Strong communication skills
• Basic experience with command-line video tools like FFMPEG, MP4Box, or TSDuck
• Knowledge of live video transmission acquisition and/or OTT encoding distribution workflows
• Basic understanding of DAI workflows in an OTT environment
• Basic network transport understanding (Multicast, TCP/UDP)
• Knowledge of audio codecs and containers (AAC, PCM, AC-3, EAC-3, MPEG-1 Layer-II)
• Knowledge of IP video delivery protocols (HLS, MPEG-TS, DASH)
• Knowledge of MPEG Transport Streams in broadcast and ABR workflows
• Knowledge of video codecs and compression (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC)
• Experience working with encoding platforms
• Understanding of video fundamentals
• Comfortable reading xml/json
• Experience troubleshooting with hosts, including applications and services, on Linux operating systems (CentOS)
• Comfortable troubleshooting with Transport Stream and Elementary Stream analyzers
• Comfortable with Mac, Linux, and Windows environments, specifically on the command line
• Comfortable working with Disney staff around the country
• Experience working with technology in mid-size to large data centers

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA and New York, NY is $114,900.00 to $154,100.00 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.