Principal Engineer, Content Platform & Systems

The Walt Disney Company; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 247,000; Full time

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Principal Product Software Engineer to shape technical direction for high-scale content platforms across Disney’s brands and products. This role blends hands-on coding with architecture leadership, influencing multiple teams and driving coherent designs that scale globally.

You will lead complex projects, write critical-path code, mentor engineers, and champion modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted tooling, to deliver robust, scalable systems

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed services.
• Expert-level programming skills in Java or a similar OO language.
• Proven track record designing backend architectures spanning multiple teams.
• Experience building and operating message-based, distributed systems with caching.
• Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction beyond a single team.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, implementation, and delivery of software in highly complex problem spaces; write critical-path code.
• Deconstruct large architectures into independently developable components for multiple teams.
• Develop relationships with stakeholders to inform technical strategy.
• Set engineering standards and drive AI-assisted tooling adoption across the organization.
• Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and foster collaboration and quality.
• Support hiring and promotion assessments to support career growth.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend design

Mentoring engineers

Technical strategy

Code reviews

AI-assisted tooling

Tools

AWS

Terraform

OpenSearch

DynamoDB

SQS

SNS

CI/CD tooling

Job description

The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Principal Product Software Engineer to shape technical direction for high-scale content platforms across Disney’s brands and products. This role blends hands-on coding with architecture leadership, influencing multiple teams and driving coherent designs that scale globally.

You will lead complex projects, write critical-path code, mentor engineers, and champion modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted tooling, to deliver robust, scalable systems