Just finished the Disney streaming tech loop for a senior SWE role (Burbank team, what they internally call L5-equivalent). Posting because I couldn't find anything recent when I was prepping.
The system design round was one hour, one interviewer, no panel. They gave me a prompt about designing a video recommendation engine for Disney+. Not surprising given what they're building, but the follow-ups were actually interesting: they pushed hard on how you'd handle cold-start for new subscribers, what signals you'd weight differently for kids vs. adults on the same family account, and how you'd deal with content licensing windows affecting what's actually available in a given region.
What mattered: They wanted breadth first, depth on request. Don't go deep on one component before sketching the whole thing. They asked about observability explicitly. How do you know the recommendations are working? What metrics, what alerting. At L5 they expect you to bring up trade-offs without being prompted. I mentioned eventual consistency on the preference store and that got a real conversation going.
Leetcode showed up in a separate 45-minute coding round. Two mediums back to back. One graph problem, one string manipulation. No hards. The bar felt roughly equivalent to a mid-tier FAANG screening, not Google/Meta hard.
Timeline: recruiter screen, then a take-home (about 3 hours honest), then virtual onsite (4 rounds). Total elapsed time was about 5 weeks from first reach-out.
Comp for context: my offer was $195k base, $60k RSU over 4 years, standard Disney benefits. This is Burbank, not SF rates, so adjust expectations accordingly. They did say RSU refresh exists at review time but I have no data on how generous that is in practice.