Sr Media Performance Engineer, Distribution

Overview
On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we're reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world's most beloved stories while also transforming our media business for the future. Whether that's evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to enhance flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney's unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
A few reasons why we think you'd love working here:

• Building the future of Disney's media: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day - from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Media Engineering builds the software and systems that prepare media content and metadata for the Disney Streaming platform - providing the best possible playback experience to our viewers. Media Engineering handles audio, video, & metadata content from ingest through publish - for normalization, processing, and packaging - supporting operator tools and automation for a scalable workflow. We build and coordinate logic across players and back-end services to measure, control, and optimize playback across our stack.
About the Team
The Media Experience, Performance Engineering - Distribution Team is nested at the intersection of technology and innovation within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET).
Role and Responsibilities
In the role of Media Experience Senior Performance Engineer on the Distribution team, your daily responsibilities will require a combination of strategic planning, time management around internal initiatives, an ability to collaborate with development, operations and engineering teams, a hands-on approach to leadership and mentoring within the larger Media Experience organization, while utilizing cross-functional skills to ensure optimal performance across the Media Experience Distribution team and Disney owned and operated streaming services.
This position offers an opportunity for personal and professional growth, providing exposure to cutting-edge technology within the realm of streaming services.

• Analyze health of products utilizing internal and third-party tooling
• Act as first responder to both internal and external delivery escalations
• Execute mitigation steps to limit windows of impact
• Curate documentation for issue tracking and impact analysis
• Manage distribution policies using internal tooling
• Support live events, high-profile content sunrises and feature releases

Required Qualifications & Skills

• Bachelor's degree and/or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of substantial experience in streaming media, content distribution, or video technology.
• 3-5+ years of proven expertise in Live Video Streaming Systems, including encoding, distribution, and playback.
• Comprehensive understanding of the live and VOD content delivery life cycle - "glass to glass".
• Experience in implementing distributed systems with a focus on microservice architecture.
• Proven success in a high-availability, large-scale production environment on AWS or another public cloud.
• In-depth knowledge of video compression, codec standards (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1), encoding bitrate ladders, and rate control.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to mentor junior team members.
• Strong quantitative, analytical, problem-solving, debugging, and decision-making skills.
• Proficient interfacing with OTT and mobile devices (Roku, Game Consoles, Apple TV, Android, iOS, etc.).
• Familiarity with network-level tools; ThousandEyes, Kentik, Catchpoint.
• Expert use of data visualization tools; Grafana, Datadog, Kibana, Splunk.
• Understanding of CDNs and their relation to network operations, transit, and peering.
• Experience in designing and maintaining a matrix of complex documentation.
• Experience with ticketing and tracking systems like JIRA and Confluence.
• Confidence in negotiating and working with third-party services and device manufacturers.
• Background in technical project management.
• Ability to conduct independent research.
• Analytical self-starter mindset.
• Consistent track record of delivering results through ambiguity.
• Knowledge of video streaming quality metrics and technical aspects affecting the viewer experience.
• Ability to identify and resolve performance issues, optimizing end-user experience.
• Hands-on experience with tooling used to analyze subscriber data, trends, and performance metrics.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to Live and VOD Video Streaming Systems
• Strong desire to showcase understanding of encoding, distribution, and playback.

Additional Information
Reports to: Ben Yanachek, Manager MXPE-D
The hiring range for this position in New York, NY and Seattle, WA is $99,900 to $133,900 per year, in Bristol, CT and Santa Monica, CA is $95,300 to $127,800 per year, and in San Francisco, CA is $104,400 to $140,000 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.