Sr Principal Software Engineer

Job Posting Title:

Sr Principal Software Engineer

Req ID:

Job Description:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disneys past present and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers product developers designers technologists data scientists and more all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disneys media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products enhance storytelling and drive velocity innovation and scalability for our are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Companys media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.

Here are a few reasons why we think youd love working here:

Building the future of Disneys media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media advertising and distribution businesses for years to come. Reach Scale & Impact: More than ever Disneys technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans connections with the companys brands and stories. Disney. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC Newsand many more. These products and brands and the unmatched stories storytellers and events they carry matter to millions of people globally. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering media engineering quality assurance engineering behind personalization commerce lifecycle and identity.

Within Product Engineering the Reliability Engineering organizations mission is to make the complex invisible: every developer at Disney ESPN and Hulu should be able to build ship and operate great software without having to solve foundational distributed systems problems from scratch.

We operate across four capability areas: platform services site reliability engineering observability and AI operations. This role sits at the center of the platform services capability. It is one of the most consequential technical bets we are making to improve engineering velocity and reliability across 4000 engineers.

Job Summary:

As a Senior Principal Software Engineer Platform Services you will design implement and evolve the endtoend architecture and software for Disneys streaming platform services layer the foundational primitives that determine:

• How fast all engineers across Disney ESPN and Hulu deliver features
• How reliably those features operate at global scale
• How confidently teams can build on shared infrastructure instead of reinventing it

Reporting to the VP Software Engineering - Reliability this individual contributor role owns the technical vision and core software implementations for platform services used by 400 engineering teams. You will work from an existing API edge (fraud detection schema registry API registry Kinesis streams) to design and build the full platform services layer from API gateway and servicetoservice authentication to rate limiting distributed tracing observability and experimentation.

You bring hyperscale platform experience and set standards through working software rather than mandates. You operate with the judgment of someone who has seen distributed systems fail at 10000engineer scale and knows how to design and debug them in production. You will collaborate with domain engineering Directors and VPs across the organization to align platform capabilities with product delivery goals communicate platform strategy and progress and build the next generation of engineering leaders through handson mentorship code and design reviews and architecture partnership.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Technical Architecture & Software Implementation

• Design implement and own the technical architecture and core software components for Disneys platform services layer including:
  • API gateway and edge services
  • Servicetoservice authentication and authorization
  • Rate limiting load shedding and circuit breaking
  • Distributed tracing telemetry capture and logging pipelines
  • User identity sharing and crossservice context propagation
  • Observability and experimentation platforms
• Write review and ship productiongrade code for shared libraries services SDKs CLI tools and goldenpath templates that are adopted by 400 teams.
• Produce reference implementations and starter kits that embody platform standards and patterns so teams can adopt best practices by default.

Standards Golden Paths & Technical Governance

• Produce architecture decision records (ADRs) technical design docs and platform RFCs that guide delivery teams and establish durable institutional standards.
• Define and maintain golden path templates and tooling that make the correct implementation the easiest path for teams consuming platform services.
• Establish API and event schema standards SLO frameworks error budgets and upgradepath contracts across the platform services portfolio ensuring compatibility backwardcompatibility where appropriate and smooth migrations.

Platform Strategy Integration & Delivery

• Review and approve service designs and platform integrations before they enter the build phase resolving crossdomain technical dependencies before they become delivery blockers.
• Partner with Directors of Platform Engineering and Site Reliability to translate architecture into executable quarterly roadmaps with clear milestones and ownership for software delivery.
• Evaluate buildversusbuy decisions with rigor including prototyping integration spikes and cost modeling; quantify total cost of ownership integration risk and longterm maintainability.

Reliability Performance & Operations Engineering

• Lead deep technical investigations into complex production issues across distributed systems including crossservice performance bottlenecks cascading failures and resiliency gaps.
• Design and implement platformlevel resiliency patterns (e.g. retries bulkheads fallback strategies) into shared libraries and services so teams inherit reliability by default.
• Partner with SRE and observability teams to ensure platform services have excellent telemetry dashboards and alerting and that incidents drive improvements to the platform itself.

AIReady Platform Services

• Ensure platform primitives are AIready from day one: design infrastructure that AI and ML systems can rely on including support for:
  • Inference routing and traffic splitting
  • Model telemetry and monitoring
  • Experiment tracking and featureflagging for models and AIpowered experiences
• Collaborate with AI/ML teams to build reusable software components and patterns that accelerate AI workloads on the platform.

Leadership Influence & Mentorship (ExecutiveLevel IC)

• Operate as an executivelevel individual contributor (P6): drive technical direction across multiple organizations influence Directors and VPs and make decisions that materially shape the platform strategy.
• Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers across the organization through pairing code reviews design critiques and architecture reviews building the next generation of engineering leaders.
• Communicate platform service strategy roadmap progress and key technical tradeoffs to domain engineering Directors and VPs translating architecture decisions into velocity cost and reliability outcomes for the business.

How Youll Know Youre Successful

• Operations With Less Effort
  Foundational platform services are widely adopted because they meaningfully reduce the time required to build maintain verify and operate global consumerscale systems.
• Standards Through Code
  Golden path implementations libraries and templates you build are the default starting point for new services across Disney ESPN and Hulu eliminating redundant foundational work at the team level.
• Improved Engineering Velocity
  DORA metrics show measurable improvement in deployment frequency and lead time as teams stop rebuilding infrastructure and start shipping features on top of your platform services.
• Cost Visibility & Efficiency
  Every service has clear cost attribution and observability enabling informed scaling and investment decisions at the VP and EVP levels. Platform primitives embed cost metrics by default.
• Reliability Improvement
  Incidents caused by integration gaps verification failures improperly implemented distributed patterns or insufficient load testing materially decrease as teams adopt platform standards and tooling.
• AIReady Infrastructure
  At least three production AI or ML services run on platform primitives you designed and implemented proving that the platform is capable of supporting Disneys AI ambitions.

Required Education Experience/Skills/Training:

• 12 years of software engineering experience with at least 5 years in a Staff Principal or higherlevel individual contributor role owning largescale systems.
• Direct experience designing building and operating platform or infrastructure services in an organization of 1000 engineers including navigating crossorg coordination at hyperscale.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and platforms such as API gateways service mesh distributed tracing observability platforms rate limiting circuit breaking and load shedding.
• Proven track record of delivering platform services as software that achieve broad internal adoption; you understand what to build so engineers choose to use the platform.
• Handson experience with servicetoservice authentication zerotrust networking and identity federation at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical architecture and platform strategy to Directors and VPs translating system design decisions into measurable velocity cost and reliability outcomes.
• Experience leading teams through buildversusbuy decisions for platformlevel capabilities including prototyping vendor evaluation and longterm ownership considerations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a hyperscaler or large consumer technology company (e.g. Google Meta Netflix Apple Microsoft or equivalent) with platform engineering and small company experience as well.
• Prior work building infrastructure that AI or ML systems depend on such as inference routing feature stores model telemetry or experiment tracking.
• Background in streaming media infrastructure: CDN integration live event architecture or highconcurrency content delivery systems.
• Experience defining and governing SLO frameworks error budgets and production readiness standards across a large engineering organization.

Required Education

• Related Bachelors Degree or Higher

The hiring range for this position in Seattle WA is $239700 - $321400 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidates geographic region job-related knowledge skills and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package in addition to the full range of medical financial and/or other benefits dependent on the level and position offered.

Job Posting Segment:

PE - Streaming Backend

Job Posting Primary Business:

PE - Streaming Backend - Developer Productivity & Operational Excellence

Primary Job Posting Category:

Software Engineer

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City State Region Postal Code:

Seattle WA USA

Alternate City State Region Postal Code:

Date Posted: