The Walt Disney Company is “hard at work in improving the tech side of [our] business” said CEO Bob Iger – after a sweeping leadership overhaul at the company, which this week reported $23.6 billion in Q2 revenues.
Disney appointed Susan Doniz as its Chief Information and Data Officer in February 2025. It has also brought in Andrew Kirkland as its new Global CISO, effective April 2025, as returning CEO Iger continues to build a team.
At a more hands-on engineering level, it has hired Head of Technology Adam Smith (a former head of product management at YouTube) and Head of Engineering Andre Rohe, a YouTube and Meta veteran; both are heavily focused on “algorithmic programming and personalization, deploying AI across all of our service,” executives said last month.
Iger told analysts on May 7: “Two other pillars of growth for that business [Disney+] will be technology… We've taken a lot of steps already, [and plan a] lot more in terms of personalization and customization, a lot on the ad-tech side and much more coming. I was just taken through a roadmap for the rest of the year… We're talking about near-term where the technology improvements to the platforms will be significant.”
Among its priorities has been building out the architecture for its soon-to-launch ESPN direct-to-consumer streaming service, dubbed “Flagship”, details of which will be revealed next week. (“That service will have many more features than the linear service will have,” vowed Iger.)
The company is hiring extensively across digital, with numerous open roles in software engineering, machine learning, data engineering, SREs, systems engineers for CDN/edge workloads, observability, and more; amid what appears to be a significant technology overhaul.
The company is a heavy AWS user, both public use case stories and its open-source projects show, including of streaming service Kinesis, although a once-regular streaming technology blog has dried up.
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