Lead Product Software Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Product Software Engineer to help standardize web delivery across consumer-facing brands. This onsite role in Glendale, CA focuses on end-to-end guest-facing web application development, paved-path architecture, and AI-assisted engineering standards that improve reliability and developer experience at scale.

You will set and execute technical direction across brand sites, modernize legacy stacks onto current platforms, and drive engineering practices that support performance, scalability, and observability in mission-critical cloud services. The compensation range is USD 155,700 - 208,700 per year.

Responsibilities

• Build, modernize, and own guest-facing web applications end to end, including the rendered front end, APIs, identity integrations, and caching behaviors that enable speed and reliability at scale.
• Define and execute long-term technical strategy across all brand sites, with emphasis on reliability, observability, and delivering quality aligned to business priorities.
• Research, evangelize, and drive adoption of paved-path architecture patterns and engineering standards that work across brands rather than being site-specific.
• Lead migrations from legacy stacks to current platforms, including scoping, sequencing against live traffic, and completing work without guest-facing regressions.
• Reduce engineering friction across the portfolio through tooling, debugging interfaces, deployment models, and automation that help teams ship faster with less risk.
• Establish standards for AI-assisted development, including review gates, validation practices, and the observability needed to trust automated changes in critical paths.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to senior engineers, conduct effective design reviews, and collaborate with P5-level Engineering Leads on stack standardization.
• Own accountability for performance, scalability, and resiliency of mission-critical cloud-based services.
• Influence department-wide technical planning and manage technical risks for critical site projects.

Requirements

• Minimum of 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 behind 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 to completion.
• Ability to drive technical decisions beyond your own team and communicate complex technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Technologies

React, TypeScript, server-side rendering, APIs, identity integrations, DNS, caching strategy, REST, GraphQL, Amazon Web Services, CloudFront, Route 53, WAF, Varnish, edge delivery.

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.