Lead Product Software Engineer (DevOps/Web Dev)

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Product Software Engineer to help standardize and modernize guest-facing web delivery across Disney and N&E Alliance brands. This onsite role in Glendale, CA focuses on owning the full stack of application delivery, from front-end rendering through services/APIs and the delivery and edge layers.

In this position, you will set and execute a long-term technical strategy, drive reliability and observability practices, and advance paved-path architecture and engineering standards that scale across brands rather than living in isolated site implementations.

Role scope

• Lead full-stack product software engineering efforts for guest-facing web applications, owning the rendered front end, APIs, identity integrations, and caching behavior that support fast, reliable delivery at scale.
• Define and execute a long-term technical strategy across all brand sites, with emphasis on reliability, observability, and delivering high-quality outcomes aligned to business priorities.
• Own application, services/APIs, and delivery/edge layers, including performance, scalability, and resiliency for mission-critical cloud-based services.

Key responsibilities

• Build, modernize, and own guest-facing web applications end to end, from front-end rendering through APIs, identity integrations, and caching behavior.
• Research, evangelize, and drive paved-path architecture patterns and engineering standards that hold across brands.
• Lead migrations of legacy stacks to current platforms, including scoping, sequencing against live traffic, and completing the effort without guest-facing regression.
• Reduce engineering friction across the portfolio through tooling, debugging interfaces, deployment models, and automation that enable faster shipping with less risk.
• Establish standards for AI-assisted development usage across teams, including review gates, validation, and the observability required to trust automation in critical paths.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to senior engineers, run effective design reviews, and collaborate with P5-level Engineering Leads on stack standardization.
• Influence department-wide technical planning, including managing technical risks for critical site projects.

Requirements

• Minimum 7 years of relevant experience as a software engineer or architect.
• Production experience building and shipping guest-facing web applications, including modern front-end frameworks such as React with TypeScript and server-side rendering, plus the backend services and APIs supporting them.
• Strong command of web architecture principles, including HTTP, DNS, caching strategy, and API delivery paradigms such as REST and GraphQL.
• Hands-on experience developing and maintaining high-volume distributed services on Amazon Web Services, including edge delivery and caching through CloudFront or an equivalent CDN.
• Demonstrated experience leading a legacy platform migration or large-scale standardization effort through completion.
• Ability to drive technical decisions beyond your own team and communicate complex tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.

Technologies

• React, TypeScript, server-side rendering
• HTTP, DNS, REST, GraphQL
• Amazon Web Services, CloudFront
• Varnish, Route 53, WAF

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Compensation & benefits

• Annual salary range: USD 155,700 - 208,700
• A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package
• Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits

Preferred qualifications

• Production configuration of Varnish, HAProxy, or CloudFront, including cache policy design and its interaction with experimentation and personalization.
• Experience building developer tooling, debugging interfaces, or branch-based deployment models.
• Gated AI-assisted development practice, including incremental validation and human review of generated changes.
• Observability and alerting in Datadog.