Principal Software Engineer

Job Posting Title:

Principal Software Engineer

Req ID:

10124662

Job Description:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

Responsibilities

• Take ambiguous or conflicting requirements and bring clarity by proposing different solutions and communicating concrete and concise trade-offs.

• Manage partnerships with CDNs and other vendors in the media distribution space to provide technical solutions in the distribution problem space

• Lead technical architecture in the CDN space, building solutions and driving conversations as necessary

• Develop a mental and quantitative model for our coordinated mesh CDN strategy and architecture

• Manage CDN relationships, negotiating traffic, capacity, and pricing to optimize Disney’s ability to serve a high-quality media experience at the lowest cost possible 

• Develop scalable and simple solutions to challenging engineering problems that are easy to maintain on ambitious timelines

• Tie data from internal and external sources, transforming & improving as needed to power well-structured database and data lake solutions

• Lead by example writing well-constructed and easy to maintain code, defensive and robust tests.

• Raise the quality bar across the team by driving engineering standard methodologies and innovative tools, design patterns and engineering processes. 

• Take ambiguous or conflicting requirements and bring clarity by proposing software architectures and communicating concrete and concise trade-offs.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science-related field or equivalent work experience

• 10+ years of experience in a development background and proficiency in Python

• Experience working with CDNs or a media background. Finance experience is a plus.

• Experience with data modeling and simplifying data across multiple sources into a normalized format for leveraging in data-intensive use-cases

• You have experience designing and shipping data engineering software solutions.

• You have a mind for building easily developed and deployed applications 

• Databricks experience or other data lake technology is preferred

• You have working knowledge of Python in a Spark environment. You have an interest in video streaming and internet networking.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $193,100 to $258,900 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $184,300 to $247,100; and the hiring range for this position in North Carolina is $175,500 to $235,400 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.

Job Posting Segment:

Media Engineering

Job Posting Primary Business:

ME - Strategic Architecture

Primary Job Posting Category:

Software Engineer

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Santa Monica, CA, USA

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

USA - NY - 7 Hudson Square

Date Posted:

2025-07-03