Media Streaming Engineering Manager

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Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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:

1. 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.

2. 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. 

3. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

We are seeking a highly skilled and collaborative Manager, Media Streaming Engineer to lead Platform Operations across our direct-to-consumer streaming applications. This role will focus on ensuring the integrity, performance, and scalability of artwork, metadata, and audio-video workflows that power the user experience across Disney+, Hulu, and other streaming platforms.

The ideal candidate will have deep technical expertise in media streaming, metadata systems, and artwork pipelines, along with strong leadership capabilities to manage cross-functional teams and drive operational excellence.

Key responsibilities will include:

Leadership of an in-market team of operators who ensure high availability and performance across all supported platforms as well as managing escalations and root-cause analysis for artwork, metadata, and audio-video issues impacting playback or presentation. 

Collaborating with internal engineering teams responsible for artwork and metadata processing to ensure a consistent experience around the world in Disney+, ESPN and Hulu

Monitoring internal applications to proactively detect and resolve issues in metadata and artwork pipelines, while driving detect and resolve issues in metadata and artwork pipelines.

Management of a team of streaming engineers and operators, providing mentorship, detect and resolve issues in metadata and artwork pipelines.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Lead and mentor a team of engineers and operators supporting the direct-to-consumer applications from an artwork, metadata and media perspective

• Collaborate with engineering teams to identify gaps in tooling and workflows and prioritize fixes

• Troubleshoot and debug content issues and escalate as appropriate.

• Training and Documentation, including contributions to objectives and key results

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in media streaming engineering or platform operations, with at least 2 years in a leadership role.

• Strong understanding of metadata systems, artwork pipelines, and video/audio encoding workflows.

• Experience with CMS platforms, and observability frameworks.

• Familiarity with SVOD, AVOD, and live streaming architectures.

• Experience in new and emerging video/audio encoding tech (4K/UHD, HDR, Atmos)

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and drive operational excellence.

• Comfortable working on Linux operating systems

• Experience with ffmpeg

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with regionalized artwork and metadata compliance.

• Knowledge of content entitlement models and dual distribution contexts.

• Background in agile methodologies and product lifecycle management.

• Familiarity with third-party metadata sources like Gracenote.

• Experience working with an enterprise, or workstation, encoding solution such as, AWS Elemental, Ateme Titan, Wowza or Harmonic.

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