Disney Music Group Software Engineer Case Interview — Global Soundtrack Release & Rights Platform

This case simulates designing a backend platform for Disney Music Group (Hollywood Records, Walt Disney Records, Disney Music Publishing, Buena Vista Records, Disney Concerts) to plan, secure, and activate worldwide soundtrack and catalog releases across territories and partners. The interview mirrors Disney’s real emphasis on guest-first thinking (fans, artists, internal label teams), collaboration with Legal/Publishing/Marketing, brand safety, and reliable launches tied to major franchise timelines. What you’ll receive: (1) a short brief describing an upcoming tentpole soundtrack drop with midnight local releases in multiple regions, (2) a sample rights matrix CSV (territory, window start/stop, DSP/channel, embargo), (3) partial metadata (ISRC/UPC, track/album, contributors/credits, localization assets), (4) pre-save counts and marketing campaign IDs, and (5) a prior incident summary about an early-activation leak. Your tasks in-session: 1) Frame the problem and stakeholders (5 min): define Guests, success criteria, and non-goals; call out cross-functional partners (Label Ops, Publishing, Legal). 2) Architecture and data model (20 min): propose services for Release Orchestrator, Rights Service, Metadata/Identity (ISRC/UPC <-> internal IDs), Asset Pipeline (checksums, storage tiers, pre-release vault), and Event Bus for downstream notifications; describe tables/entities (Releases, Tracks, Rights, Territories, Windows, Credits, Campaigns, AuditLog). 3) API design (10 min): sketch versioned endpoints (e.g., POST /releases, PUT /releases/{id}/rights, GET /territories/{code}/availability), idempotency keys, pagination, RBAC roles (A&R, Legal, Ops), and auditability; discuss rate limits and change-review flows. 4) Scale, reliability, and timing (10 min): handle midnight local activations across time zones with idempotent schedulers, queues, and canary rollouts; define SLOs (e.g., ≥99.9% on-time activation, p95 availability query <300 ms), failure isolation, backfill strategies, and RTO/RPO; outline runbooks and feature flags for safe reversions. 5) Security/compliance (5 min): protect pre-release assets with least-privilege, KMS-managed encryption, watermarking for previews, secure artifact promotion, PI minimization, and GDPR/CCPA considerations for fan interactions. 6) Metrics and observability (5 min): propose dashboards and alerts (late activations, conflicting rights, metadata completeness, credit accuracy), plus post-launch verification against partner acknowledgements. 7) Curveballs (during design): (a) a last-minute territory swap that delays Japan by 48 hours without impacting global charts, and (b) a composer credit correction after mastering freeze; explain your safe-change plan, audit trail, royalty backfill, and communication to partners. Evaluation rubric (Disney-aligned): guest-first tradeoffs, clarity of storytelling, collaborative approach, brand and content safety, pragmatic engineering choices, and ability to reason about rights/metadata at scale. Format: whiteboard or shared doc; pseudocode welcome; no need to compile. Deliverables by the end: annotated architecture sketch, brief API outline, key tables, SLOs, and a rollback/validation plan.