Software Engineer I

Software Engineer I will join the Observability & Insights group to help build telemetry, monitoring, and insights platforms that support Disney’s large-scale streaming services.

Responsibilities

• Develop, test, and document features in existing observability codebases across 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 aligned to team standards and established observability frameworks.
• Learn and apply patterns for high-volume, low-latency telemetry ingestion and storage.
• Assist with service instrumentation and validate telemetry quality (metrics, logs, traces) with partner engineering teams.
• Build and update dashboards, reports, and visualizations for system health and operational trends.
• Tune alerting and reduce noise under guidance from senior engineers and incident response partners.
• Participate in code reviews by giving and receiving constructive feedback.
• Contribute to technical design discussions for small-to-medium features and document work for maintainability and onboarding.
• Work on guided implementation tasks to gain exposure to AWS, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Shadow on-call rotations and incident response workflows to build operational awareness.
• Break down assigned work into clear tasks, ask questions early, and communicate progress and blockers proactively.
• Partner across the Observability & Insights group and service engineering teams to deliver incremental improvements.
• Participate in team rituals including standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and knowledge-sharing.
• Build foundational skills in reliability engineering concepts such as SLIs, SLOs, post-incident reviews, and blameless culture.

Requirements

• Proficiency in at least one backend or systems programming language: Go or Python (coursework, internships, and personal projects count).
• Foundational knowledge of software development practices: Git, unit testing, debugging, and working within an existing codebase.
• Basic familiarity with cloud computing concepts, with interest in learning AWS and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Introductory understanding of observability concepts: metrics, logs, tracing, alerting (or strong motivation to learn quickly).
• Ability to communicate clearly, accept feedback, and collaborate effectively in a distributed engineering team.

Technologies

• Go, Python, Git
• AWS, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, telemetry pipelines
• SLIs, SLOs
• Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic
• distributed systems, data pipelines, event-driven architectures
• Kafka
• CI/CD

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 such as 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 showing 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.

Benefits

• 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.

Role Details

• Location: Glendale, CA (onsite)
• Compensation: USD 97,500 - 130,700 per yearly
• Team: Product Engineering, the unified team responsible for engineering Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms
• Group: Observability & Insights
• Products supported: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, ABC News, and related products

Required Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a comparable field of study, or equivalent work experience.