Principal Software Engineer - Observability

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

Principal Software Engineer - Observability

Req ID: 10157430

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney's past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more - all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney's media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company's media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.

Here are a few reasons why we think you'd love working here:

• Building the future of Disney's media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney's technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company's brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands matter to millions of people globally.
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, and the engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming's distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly.

Job Summary

As a Principal Software Engineer, you are a forward-thinking, highly technical, hands-on-keyboard builder. You work across unfamiliar codebases, teams, and subject matters to accelerate software engineering velocity with AI, shipping production code for our products and applications across the enterprise in a fast-paced, AI-native engineering environment, with a strong understanding of application observability.

You will design and build intelligent systems that improve the reliability and performance of Disney's large-scale streaming ecosystem, including fully autonomous agentic systems and real-time pipelines that turn telemetry, logs, and user signals into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive insights across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN.

You operate with independence and a strong innovation bias, scoping your own work, making sound tradeoff decisions, and tying everything you build to clear business value and security approvals. You use frontier AI models as a force multiplier to deliver well above typical engineering velocity while keeping token and compute costs rational through optimization and smart model routing. You have a strong desire to work as a technical thought leader setting technical direction and raising the engineering bar through design and code reviews.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate intelligent, production-grade systems that use real-time signals and AI-driven detection to improve the health of streaming platforms, critical services, and customer experience.
• Build and scale fully autonomous agentic systems powered by modern 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.