Principal Software Engineer

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 on the Solutions Architecture team, you will represent the Product Engineering group as an Architect.

This entails coordinating with engineering leaders across disciplines (client applications, identity, commerce, media, content orchestration, telemetry, core services) to define the most effective solutions to business needs and engineering challenges. You will be designing, developing, and disseminating technical strategy across disciplines. This role is overseeing and influencing product solutions, with a distinct focus on backend solutions, across Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology brands such as Disney+ and Hulu. This includes championing technical initiatives with an eye towards unifying client and service teams on scalable solutions that power resilient customer experiences.

The role requires an inherent desire to quickly deep-dive on engineering and business use cases with the ability to provide multiple solutions, weighing both the value created and effort required by the decisions you will make. This includes authoring detailed technical documentation, actively participating in technical proposals with peers, and coaching/mentoring other principal developers and architects throughout the company.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Help design the architecture and drive the implementation of novel engineering solutions for a wide range of client platforms.
• Coordinate with engineering leaders across all disciplines to define effective requirements and technical solutions.
• Author detailed technical design documentation
• Rapidly address production issues and clearly articulate root cause analyses

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building and maintaining globally scaled customer facing applications.
• 5+ years of experience working across disciplines such as product, program, and business stakeholders to refine plans and strategy.
• Demonstrates strong leadership, facilitation, and presentation skills, with a proven ability to influence business and technology leadership without authority.
• Possesses excellent written and verbal communication skills, and is well-organized, capable of delivering through ambiguity, working both independently and collaboratively, and multi-tasking amongst multiple priorities.
• Regularly conceptualize and communicate innovative ideas and proactively share knowledge with others.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience developing applications on mobile or connected devices (smartTVs, set top boxes, or game consoles).
• Experience with video streaming technologies including DASH and/or HLS and DRM.

Experience with:

Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js,  Python

Documentation tools: Smithy, OpenAPI, Plantuml, Lucidchart

Datastore technologies: S3, Redis, DDB, Elastic Search, Databricks

Network protocols and tools: Load balancers, Envoy/Istio, websockets, CDNs, Charles, Fiddler

Familiarity with common cloud infrastructure environments and solutions

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent training or work experience.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $193,100.00 to $258,900.00 per year. 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.