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Hi, I'm Andrea

Andrea Pollitt

Director, Software Engineering at Disney Streaming

Engineering leader scaling teams, processes, and AI capability at streaming scale. At Disney, I built the operational insights platform that engineering teams and leaders rely on across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, then drove the AI transformation of my organization, setting the strategy, hiring, and operating model that produced production-grade GenAI tooling and catalyzed adjacent engineering, TPM, and product teams to build their own internal AI tools. I lead with integrity, making the call that’s right for the business and building the trust that lets teams ship hard things at scale. 12+ years in engineering leadership and 9 as an IC before that, building high-performing, high-retention organizations and the platforms that serve hundreds of millions of viewers.

Core Competencies

Experience

1
Disney Streaming

2021 - 2026

Seattle, WA

Streaming platform behind Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN.

Director, Software Engineering · Insights Engineering

2024 - 2026

Responsibilities:
  • Drove the AI transformation of my organization, setting the strategy, hiring, and operating model that delivered a full suite of production GenAI operations tooling spanning LLM-driven dashboard generation, AI incident prediction and triage, AI test-generation and PR-review tooling, an internal MCP server exposing platform APIs to LLM clients, and a conversational incident-triage agent in production.
  • Drove early AI adoption across all my teams, building the practices and tooling baseline that enabled an internal agent harness and orchestrator with the potential, once benchmarks land, to outperform off-the-shelf agentic coding tools for our spec-to-production workflow.
  • Catalyzed AI tool-building across Disney, inspiring engineering, TPM, and product peers to build their own internal AI tools through hands-on onboarding, All Hands demos, and a TDD-scoring system that drove the team to use LLMs for better technical design documents.
  • Built and continue to evolve the business-critical operational insights platform used by thousands of engineers and executives to monitor the real-time health of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN (“911 Emergency Response Tooling”); it surfaces critical signals to Tech SVPs and the CTO during incidents and helped the organization meet its quarterly mean-time-to-identify and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTI/MTTR) targets.
  • Contributor on the cross-Disney-Technology hiring committee designing a tech-wide software engineering hiring process to standardize loop structure, interviewer and hiring-manager training, and a new “bar raiser” role.
Director, Software Engineering · Engineering Data Strategy

2021 - 2024

Responsibilities:
  • Built the engineering data foundation and the client telemetry and data-quality platform for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN, securing the data quality behind real-time operational decisions.
  • Grew the engineering organization from 15 to 35 with industry-leading retention and 50% women representation across IC and leadership, including coaching a woman engineer into a Senior promotion that retained her at Disney.
  • Established the unified engineering data strategy that turned scattered telemetry into consistent metrics for real-time decisions, operational alerting, and business reporting across the streaming portfolio.
  • Created the career growth frameworks, leveling rubrics, performance management standards, and agile operating model adopted across my manager’s organization.

Hulu

2016 - 2021

Seattle, WA

Streaming service acquired into Disney Streaming.

Principal Software Development Lead · Android Playback

2018 - 2021

Responsibilities:
  • Led the Android client playback experience, driving the processes and accountability that took team velocity 18→50 story points, predictability 54%→95%, and bug count from 100+ to consistently under 3.
  • Pioneered the cross-organizational technical investment planning process that became the model for all Mobile engineering teams at Hulu, socialized through a talk at Hulu’s internal engineering conference.
  • Restructured release processes to ensure on-time delivery, sharply reducing hotfix requirements and release slips.
  • Delivered high-profile features including Offline Playback, the Live Guide (EPG), and Player UX improvements.
  • Led the hiring initiative that brought the first full-time woman engineer onto the Android team, re-running a biased interview loop to extend the offer; founded and ran the Women in Development group and gave the Women in Informatics Hackathon keynote.
Senior Software Development Lead · Product Instrumentation

2016 - 2018

Responsibilities:
  • Established the enterprise-wide instrumentation tag format and documentation standards that became the foundation for consistent analytics across all client applications, and personally implemented all browse and playback instrumentation for Hulu’s iOS and tvOS apps.
  • Built validation tooling to ensure accurate implementation and high data quality across releases.
  • Transitioned ownership of instrumentation to client teams, improving implementation quality and removing my team as the bottleneck.
2

3

Seattle, WA

Project portfolio management software.

Software Engineering Lead

2014 - 2016

Responsibilities:
  • Practiced agile methodologies including pair programming, TDD, and kanban-tracked user stories.
  • Designed and implemented a task management application in AngularJS and TypeScript with ng-grid.
  • Improved Grunt TypeScript build speed from 35 seconds to 5 seconds.
  • Set up Linux build boxes with Mono and NUnit Console, cutting build times from 3 minutes to 15 seconds.
  • Implemented a JSON:API serializer/deserializer in ServiceStack 3 and prototyped the company API versioning standard.

Ann Arbor, MI

Enterprise backup and security appliances (18,000+ in production).

Software Engineer

2013 - 2014

Responsibilities:
  • Assisted in implementing a coding standard across all PHP teams; started scrums for the team.
  • Designed a migration path from PHP4 to loosely coupled, testable, object-oriented code.
  • Improved Windows backup speeds 20% via bulk inserts and async DB writes.
  • Scoped and fixed a Windows data-loss bug where binary streams were missing, writing a tool that detected and recovered the lost data during the next backup.
  • Fixed numerous Exchange message-level backup bugs (off-by-ones, UTF-8 handling, memory leaks, error recovery).
4

5

East Lansing, MI

Regional telecom carrier and ISP.

Software Architect

2009 - 2013

Responsibilities:
  • Built the entire software ecosystem for running the business and maintained all the computing systems that ran it.
  • Designed an object-oriented PHP framework where modules could be created and imported into any deployment.
  • Built customer portals for billing, ticketing, server orders, and toll/toll-free number administration, integrated with carriers including Qwest via FTP.
  • Set up OpenID against the internal LDAP backend for single sign-on; ran Redmine on FreeBSD with RVM-isolated gem sets.
  • Mentored a small team of developers and designed processes for feature/bug tracking, testing, documentation, and version control.

East Lansing, MI

Computing support for the Physics department.

Computing Assistant IV

2007 - 2009

Responsibilities:
  • Built the content management system still powering the department knowledge base (support.pa.msu.edu).
  • Learned object-oriented PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and refactoring on a production system.
  • Provided IT support to professors in the Physics department.
6

Education

B.A. Video Game Development & Computer Science
Machine Learning Certification

Projects

AI Transformation of an Engineering Org
Director, Software Engineering 2024 – Present

Led the AI transformation of my engineering organization at Disney. I set the strategy, hiring, and operating model that delivered a full suite of production GenAI operations tooling: LLM-driven dashboard generation, AI incident prediction and triage, AI test-generation and PR-review tooling, an internal MCP server exposing platform APIs to LLM clients, and a conversational incident-triage agent.

The work didn’t stop at my team. I catalyzed AI tool-building across Disney, inspiring engineering, TPM, and product peers to build their own internal AI tools through hands-on onboarding, All Hands demos, and a TDD-scoring system that pushed the team to use LLMs for better technical design documents.

Operational Insights Platform
Director, Software Engineering 2021 – Present

Built and continue to evolve the business-critical operational insights platform that engineering teams and leaders rely on across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN for real-time service health, incident response, and executive reporting.

It surfaces critical signals directly to Tech SVPs and the CTO during streaming incidents, and helped the organization meet its quarterly mean-time-to-identify and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTI/MTTR) targets. Paired with an upstream data-quality and schema-enforcement layer that secures the integrity of the telemetry behind those real-time decisions.

Simon Fire (DMX Rebuild)
Technical Software Lead 2026 – Present

Ground-up rebuild of Simon Fire. Pulled all of the original Arduino-based flame-effect electronics out of the towers and installed DMX512 receivers on each one, moving the project onto a standard lighting/effects protocol.

Started writing a new button (more detail TODO).

Simon Fire (2025 Refurbishment)
Technical Software Lead 2025

Brought Simon back to life after a decade in storage. Worked through the accumulated hardware decay from sitting after Burning Man (melted cable shielding, failed SD cards, and assorted bit-rot), then took the chance to improve it:

  • Replaced and re-shielded damaged cabling; swapped failed SD cards
  • Confirmed DMX lighting integration end-to-end (laid the groundwork for the 2026 DMX rebuild)
  • Overhauled the sound system on a newer WAV Trigger library, now supporting polyphonic playback
  • Added a config mode with EEPROM-backed volume control so it can be tuned in the field
  • Tuned it to shoot more fire

Deployed at a local fundraiser and at the regional Burn in 2025.

Simon Fire Edition 2.0 (Original Build)
Simon Fire Edition 2.0 (Original Build)
Technical Software Lead 2014 – 2015

A 50 sq ft interactive fire art installation with four laser-etched capacitive touch towers driving live flame effects and LED animations. Funded by an Honoraria Art Grant from the Burning Man Organization; deployed at Burning Man 2015 and multiple Seattle regional events.

  • Designed the patterns used throughout each of the modules in C++ on the Arduino IDE
  • Implemented a concurrent LED animation system on a single-core processor, where multiple animations can run on any or all strips simultaneously
  • Calibrated the MPR121 capacitive touch sensors
  • Diagnosed and fixed a hardware bug where the touch sensors were registering voltage drops with no actual touch
  • Assisted in writing and reviewing grant applications

Media: drone footage on YouTube · Burning Man 2015 gallery · Critical NW 2015 gallery

Ignition Northwest Grants Committee
Committee Member 2025 – Present

Member of the Ignition Northwest grants committee, reviewing and awarding art grants to interactive and large-scale art projects in the Pacific Northwest regional Burning Man community.

WIFO Hackathon Kickoff Speech
Kickoff Speaker 2021

Delivered the kickoff speech at the University of Washington’s Women In Informatics (WIFO) hackathon. Talked about Hulu’s core values, how we embraced fun while working hard, and how the team navigated the pandemic transition to remote work.

Covered family care and work-life balance, and the deliberate practices Hulu used to replace the social bonding that disappeared when offices closed: meeting-free days, intentional casual conversations, ramping up competition in product release demos, playing video games together, and cooking classes. Closed on Hulu’s ongoing investment in increasing diversity in hiring.

Girls Who Code
Volunteer Speaker Ongoing

Volunteer speaker sharing engineering career paths and industry experience with students.

Ada Developers Academy
Volunteer Mentor & Interview Coach Ongoing

Mentor and interview coach for Ada cohorts, supporting women and gender-expansive adults transitioning into software engineering careers.

Ice Hockey
Skater 2013 – Present

Beer-league hockey in Seattle. Started in 2013 and haven’t stopped.