Principal Java Engineer & Tech Leader for Scalable Content

5014 Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 247,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Long-term incentive units

Medical benefits

Job summary

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology is hiring a Principal Product Software Engineer in Glendale, CA to set technical direction for high-scale content platforms and multiply engineering impact. You will balance coding, design, and architecture, delivering robust, scalable systems that power Disney’s brands across streaming and media platforms.

You will lead cross-team initiatives, influence architectural decisions, and mentor engineers while maintaining a focus on delivering business value and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale, highly available distributed services.
• Expert-level programming skills in Java or a similar object-oriented language.
• Proven track record designing backend architectures that span multiple teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction beyond a single team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, and delivery of software in highly ambiguous and significantly complex problem spaces that have long-term impact on our products, technology, and architecture.
• Heavily influence the design and personally write a significant portion of critical-path code, making the right trade-offs between opportunity and architectural complexity.
• Deconstruct large architectures into components that can be developed independently by multiple teams, then align those teams toward simple, coherent designs that come together into an integrated whole.
• Lead strategically important projects that span multiple teams.
• Acquire a deep understanding of our business processes, dependent systems, and teams, and develop professional relationships with key stakeholders to inform technical strategy and drive alignment.
• Set the standard for engineering excellence across the organization and drive best practices across the organization, including AI-assisted tooling.
• Amplify your impact as a force multiplier: lead design reviews, probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, foster shared understanding, handle escalations, and mitigate complexity risks.
• Bring business and industry context to technology decisions and influence business and technology direction.
• Actively develop and mentor engineers across and beyond your organization, participate in hiring, and support career growth.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Terraform

OpenSearch

Job description

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology is hiring a Principal Product Software Engineer in Glendale, CA to set technical direction for high-scale content platforms and multiply engineering impact. You will balance coding, design, and architecture, delivering robust, scalable systems that power Disney’s brands across streaming and media platforms.

You will lead cross-team initiatives, influence architectural decisions, and mentor engineers while maintaining a focus on delivering business value and