Principal Observability Engineer: AI-Driven Reliability

Disney; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney is seeking a Principal Software Engineer in Observability to design and ship AI-enhanced telemetry and real-time detection across streaming platforms. You will work across unfamiliar codebases, define system health metrics, and build scalable pipelines to improve reliability and performance for Disney+ and ESPN ecosystems.

You will lead the implementation of frontier-model powered, autonomous systems and developer tooling, driving faster engineering velocity while managing compute and

Responsibilities

• Design and operate intelligent, production-grade systems that use real-time signals and AI-driven detection to improve health of streaming platforms, critical services, and customer experience.
• Build and scale fully autonomous agentic systems powered by frontier models (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta) that reason over complex system behavior, decide and act with minimal human intervention, and drive faster detection and resolution.
• Design intelligent harnesses, memory, and multi-agent orchestration patterns - including prompting and context strategies, task decomposition, retrieval, tool routing, and error recovery - that maximize model performance and accuracy and reduce hallucinations across AI-generated context and actions.
• Develop end-to-end systems across front end and back end, including data and decisioning pipelines, and scalable APIs that deliver predictive signals, explainability, and insights to engineering teams and product stakeholders.
• Keep AI usage cost-effective through prompt and context optimization, caching, batching, and smart model routing across frontier APIs and self-hosted open-source models.
• Apply software engineering best practices end to end: clean, well-tested code, thorough code reviews, and mature CI/CD, owning components of production systems.
• Drop into brand-new or unfamiliar codebases, rapidly build a working mental model, and modernize them with AI.

Job description

Disney is seeking a Principal Software Engineer in Observability to design and ship AI-enhanced telemetry and real-time detection across streaming platforms. You will work across unfamiliar codebases, define system health metrics, and build scalable pipelines to improve reliability and performance for Disney+ and ESPN ecosystems.

You will lead the implementation of frontier-model powered, autonomous systems and developer tooling, driving faster engineering velocity while managing compute and