Summary
Derek Prestegard is a Senior Staff Software Engineer specializing in cloud-native video systems with eight years of focused experience designing end-to-end media workflows for major studios. At The Walt Disney Studios he architects forensic watermarking, multi-key 4K DRM, and HEVC encoding pipelines (SDR/HDR10/Dolby Vision), often integrating deep learning remastering tools and MovieLabs standards into scalable Kubernetes-based workflows. He combines hands-on engineering with product and leadership savvy, having led teams and infrastructure refreshes that materially reduced costs and improved capacity at Encompass and VUDU. Comfortable across Python, Java, Node, and extensive AWS services, he also applies practical DevOps and CI/CD patterns to drive resilient, automated media processing. Known inside industry circles as a "video nerd," he brings rare domain depth in both content-quality engineering and large-scale delivery economics — for example implementing JIT watermark delivery via Lambda@Edge and an automated origin purge that cut CDN origin costs by 80%.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Seabury Hall
University of California Santa Cruz
English