Technology is at the heart of Disney’s 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 Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s 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 you’d love working here:

Building the future of Disney’s 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, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and 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.

Job Summary

As a Principal Software Engineer within the user foundations team you will report to the Senior Principal Engineer, working across multiple teams and initiatives in order to guide the direction and architecture of multi-region global distributed systems. You will be a key part of an engaging, dynamic and inclusive engineering organization, grounded in scrum and agile practices, CI/CD, great collaboration and motivated by a commitment to continuous learning and improvement. You’ll coordinate with other lead & principal engineers to drive several critical and complex projects including Stream Concurrency & Impression tracking, User Data scale, Feature Flagging, and more. The scope and usage of each of these projects reaches far outside of our immediate organization, covering not just our streaming products, but also Disney’s entertainment brands from across the business.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll:

• Be hands-on. Working with engineers across multiple global teams, often leading proof of concept designs and providing guidance to prove out ideas that define the forward looking technological direction.

• Influence the roadmap for multiple teams, working in partnership with your peers and partners across Product, Project Management, and Engineering.

• Understand the strategic business goals of the organization and use this to guide cross team solutions, architecture, and priorities that bring significant business value without unnecessary technical complexity or risk.

• Be present in cross organizational discussions, representing engineers within your teams. Use your knowledge to proactively identify and document architectural gaps and focus areas.

• Contribute to an inclusive culture that values learning and development, close collaboration between team members, and strives for excellence.

• Mentor engineers across teams to help them improve their technical abilities and build their profiles within and outside of the organization.

Experience

• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.

• Understanding of product architecture, high-quality coding, testing, and development practices.

• In depth experience of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) language such as: Java, Scala, or Kotlin.

• Experience with at least one of the following cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Compute (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.

• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling.

• Experience in gaining alignment across multiple teams in order to deliver significant products or features.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, specifically in understanding, framing and simplifying both technical & business requirements.

• Comfort with ambiguity and leading conversations where discordant views are present.

Other Relevant Skills (Not requirements)

• Significant Experience of designing, building & operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.

• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Experience Monitoring and optimizing applications, especially those written for the JVM.

• Experience with data warehouse, pipeline, and analytics platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake.

• Excellent communication skills, specifically in understanding, framing and simplifying both technical & business requirements.

• Comfort with ambiguity and leading conversations where discordant views are present.

• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, Aurora, & DynamoDB with experience modeling & optimizing query performance.

• Experience with Kinesis, Kafka, or any other streaming data.

• Experience building micro/web services - including REST and GraphQL.

• Experience or interest in functional programming and its real-world applications - particularly Scala stacks such as Cats Effect and ZIO.

• Experience mentoring and coaching more junior engineers on both technical and soft skills.

• Contributions to the technical community, either through blogs, internal workshops, meetups or conferences.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

• Minimum 10 years related work experience.

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA and Santa Monica, CA is $188,400 - $252,600, for Seattle, WA and New York, NY is $197,400 - $264,700, and for San Francisco, CA is $206,400 - $276,700. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s 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.