Principal Observability Engineer - AI-Driven Systems

The Walt Disney Company; New York (NY); On-site; USD 193,000 - 259,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology seeks a Principal Software Engineer to advance AI-powered streaming platforms. You will design, build, and operate intelligent systems across frontend and backend, leveraging frontier models and real-time telemetry to improve reliability and user experience.

You will lead cross-functional collaborations, mentor engineers, and push for performance, cost efficiency, and security in a fast-paced, AI-native environment with strong emphasis on

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with AI-powered or data-driven applications and scalable APIs.
• Proven ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar codebases and modernize systems with AI at higher productivity.
• Expertise in model prompting, context engineering, and orchestration patterns for autonomous workflows.
• Strong AI/ML engineering experience with foundation models and cloud deployments.
• Experience with modern development practices including GitHub, Docker, AWS/EKS, and CI/CD.
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate intelligent, production-grade systems using real-time signals and AI-driven detection to improve health of streaming platforms and services.
• Build and scale autonomous agentic systems powered by frontier models that reason over complex behavior and drive faster detection and resolution.
• Design harnesses, memory, and orchestration patterns to maximize model performance and reduce hallucinations across AI actions.
• Develop end-to-end data and decisioning pipelines and scalable APIs delivering predictive signals and insights to teams.
• Keep AI usage cost-effective through prompt optimization, caching, and smart routing across frontier APIs and self-hosted models.
• Apply software engineering best practices end-to-end: clean code, code reviews, CI/CD, and production ownership.
• Rapidly understand unfamiliar codebases and modernize them with AI to improve observability, reliability, and developer productivity.

Skills

AI/ML engineering

API design

Cloud platforms

Independent work

Strong communication

AI model prompting

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

GitHub

Docker

AWS/EKS

LangChain/LangGraph

OpenAI/Anthropic API

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology seeks a Principal Software Engineer to advance AI-powered streaming platforms. You will design, build, and operate intelligent systems across frontend and backend, leveraging frontier models and real-time telemetry to improve reliability and user experience.

You will lead cross-functional collaborations, mentor engineers, and push for performance, cost efficiency, and security in a fast-paced, AI-native environment with strong emphasis on