Sr Principal Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Seattle, WA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization focused on building and advancing the technological backbone for Disney’s media business. The team combines technology with creativity to create world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive innovation and scalability. This role is within the Product Engineering organization, specifically the Reliability Engineering team, which aims to simplify distributed systems for developers across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu. The role sits within the platform services capability, a critical area for improving engineering velocity and reliability for thousands of engineers. The Senior Principal Software Engineer will design, implement, and evolve the architecture and software for Disney’s streaming platform services layer, which impacts feature delivery speed, reliability at scale, and the ability for teams to build on shared infrastructure. This individual contributor role reports to the VP Software Engineering - Reliability and owns the technical vision and software implementations for platform services used by over 400 engineering teams. The engineer will work from an existing API edge to build the full platform services layer, including API gateway, service-to-service authentication, rate limiting, distributed tracing, observability, and experimentation. The role requires hyperscale platform experience and the ability to set standards through working software. Collaboration with domain engineering Directors and VPs is expected to align platform capabilities with product goals, communicate strategy, and mentor future engineering leaders.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a Staff, Principal, or higher-level individual contributor role owning large-scale systems.
• Direct experience designing, building, and operating platform or infrastructure services in an organization of 1,000+ engineers, including navigating cross-org 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.
• Hands-on experience with service-to-service authentication, zero-trust 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 build-versus-buy decisions for platform-level capabilities, including prototyping, vendor evaluation, and long-term ownership considerations.
• Required Bachelor’s Degree or Higher

Nice To Haves

• 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 high-concurrency content delivery systems.
• Experience defining and governing SLO frameworks, error budgets, and production readiness standards across a large engineering organization.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and own the technical architecture and core software components for Disney’s platform services layer, including API gateway and edge services, service-to-service authentication and authorization, rate limiting, load shedding, and circuit breaking, distributed tracing, telemetry capture, and logging pipelines, user identity sharing and cross-service context propagation, and observability and experimentation platforms.
• Write, review, and ship production-grade code for shared libraries, services, SDKs, CLI tools, and golden-path templates adopted by 400+ teams.
• Produce reference implementations and starter kits that embody platform standards and patterns.
• Produce architecture decision records (ADRs), technical design docs, and platform RFCs.
• Define and maintain golden path templates and tooling.
• Establish API and event schema standards, SLO frameworks, error budgets, and upgrade-path contracts.
• Review and approve service designs and platform integrations.
• Partner with Directors of Platform Engineering and Site Reliability to translate architecture into executable quarterly roadmaps.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, including prototyping, integration spikes, and cost modeling.
• Lead deep technical investigations into complex production issues across distributed systems.
• Design and implement platform-level resiliency patterns into shared libraries and services.
• Partner with SRE and observability teams to ensure platform services have excellent telemetry, dashboards, and alerting.
• Ensure platform primitives are AI-ready from day one, designing infrastructure that AI and ML systems can rely on, including support for inference routing and traffic splitting, model telemetry and monitoring, and experiment tracking and feature-flagging for models and AI-powered experiences.
• Collaborate with AI/ML teams to build reusable software components and patterns.
• Operate as an executive-level individual contributor (P6), driving technical direction, influencing Directors and VPs, and shaping platform strategy.
• Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers through pairing, code reviews, design critiques, and architecture reviews.
• Communicate platform service strategy, roadmap progress, and key technical trade-offs to domain engineering Directors and VPs.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal