Sr Principal Software Engineer

Disney Cruise Line - The Walt Disney Company; Seattle (WA); On-site; Confidential; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer, Platform Services to design and evolve the platform services layer used by 400+ engineering teams. You will architect API gateways, service authentication, rate limiting, tracing, and observability, and champion AI-ready infrastructure.

Reporting to senior leadership, you will drive architecture standards, ADRs, golden paths, and reference implementations, while mentoring engineers and aligning

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in staff/principal IC roles.
• Experience designing, building, and operating platform or infrastructure services at hyperscale.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, APIs, tracing, observability, and reliability.
• Proven track record delivering platform services with broad internal adoption.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and own the platform services architecture and core components.
• Write production-grade code for shared libraries, services, SDKs, and templates.
• Produce architecture decision records and golden path templates.
• Lead reliability and performance engineering efforts across Disney's platform.
• Mentor engineers and communicate platform strategy to senior teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Platform engineering

APIs & service mesh

Observability & telemetry

Mentorship & leadership

Build-versus-buy decisions

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher

Tools

API gateway

Service mesh

Distributed tracing

Observability tooling

Job description

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 – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – 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, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

Within Product Engineering, the Reliability Engineering organization’s mission is to make the complex invisible: every developer at Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu should be able to build, ship, and operate great software without having to solve foundational distributed systems problems from scratch.

We operate across four capability areas: platform services, site reliability engineering, observability, and AI operations. This role sits at the center of the platform services capability. It is one of the most consequential technical bets we are making to improve engineering velocity and reliability across 4,000 engineers.

Job Summary:

As a Senior Principal Software Engineer, Platform Services, you will design, implement, and evolve the end‑to‑end architecture and software for Disney’s streaming platform services layer – the foundational primitives that determine:

• How fast all engineers across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu deliver features
• How reliably those features operate at global scale
• How confidently teams can build on shared infrastructure instead of reinventing it

Reporting to the VP Software Engineering - Reliability, this individual contributor role owns the technical vision and core software implementations for platform services used by 400+ engineering teams. You will work from an existing API edge (fraud detection, schema registry, API registry, Kinesis streams) to design and build the full platform services layer — from API gateway and service‑to‑service authentication to rate limiting, distributed tracing, observability, and experimentation.

You bring hyperscale platform experience and set standards through working software rather than mandates. You operate with the judgment of someone who has seen distributed systems fail at 10,000‑engineer scale and knows how to design and debug them in production. You will collaborate with domain engineering Directors and VPs across the organization to align platform capabilities with product delivery goals, communicate platform strategy and progress, and build the next generation of engineering leaders through hands‑on mentorship, code and design reviews, and architecture partnership.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

Technical Architecture & Software Implementation

• Design, implement, and own the technical architecture and core software components for Disney’s platform services layer, including:
  • API gateway and edge services
  • Service‑to‑service authentication and authorization
  • Rate limiting, load shedding, and circuit breaking
  • Distributed tracing, telemetry capture, and logging pipelines
  • User identity sharing and cross‑service context propagation
  • Observability and experimentation platforms
• Write, review, and ship production‑grade code for shared libraries, services, SDKs, CLI tools, and golden‑path templates that are adopted by 400+ teams.
• Produce reference implementations and starter kits that embody platform standards and patterns, so teams can adopt best practices by default.

Standards, Golden Paths & Technical Governance

• Produce architecture decision records (ADRs), technical design docs, and platform RFCs that guide delivery teams and establish durable institutional standards.
• Define and maintain golden path templates and tooling that make the “correct” implementation the easiest path for teams consuming platform services.
• Establish API and event schema standards, SLO frameworks, error budgets, and upgrade‑path contracts across the platform services portfolio, ensuring compatibility, backward‑compatibility where appropriate, and smooth migrations.

Platform Strategy, Integration & Delivery

• Review and approve service designs and platform integrations before they enter the build phase, resolving cross‑domain technical dependencies before they become delivery blockers.
• Partner with Directors of Platform Engineering and Site Reliability to translate architecture into executable quarterly roadmaps, with clear milestones and ownership for software delivery.
• Evaluate build‑versus‑buy decisions with rigor, including prototyping, integration spikes, and cost modeling; quantify total cost of ownership, integration risk, and long‑term maintainability.

Reliability, Performance & Operations Engineering

• Lead deep technical investigations into complex production issues across distributed systems, including cross‑service performance bottlenecks, cascading failures, and resiliency gaps.
• Design and implement platform‑level resiliency patterns (e.g., retries, bulkheads, fallback strategies) into shared libraries and services so teams inherit reliability by default.
• Partner with SRE and observability teams to ensure platform services have excellent telemetry, dashboards, and alerting, and that incidents drive improvements to the platform itself.

AI‑Ready Platform Services

• Ensure platform primitives are AI‑ready from day one: design infrastructure that AI and ML systems can rely on, including support for:
  • Inference routing and traffic splitting
  • Model telemetry and monitoring
  • Experiment tracking and feature‑flagging for models and AI‑powered experiences
• Collaborate with AI/ML teams to build reusable software components and patterns that accelerate AI workloads on the platform.

Leadership, Influence & Mentorship (Executive‑Level IC)

• Operate as an executive‑level individual contributor (P6): drive technical direction across multiple organizations, influence Directors and VPs, and make decisions that materially shape the platform strategy.
• Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers across the organization through pairing, code reviews, design critiques, and architecture reviews, building the next generation of engineering leaders.
• Communicate platform service strategy, roadmap progress, and key technical trade‑offs to domain engineering Directors and VPs, translating architecture decisions into velocity, cost, and reliability outcomes for the business.

How You’ll Know You’re Successful

• Operations With Less Effort
  Foundational platform services are widely adopted because they meaningfully reduce the time required to build, maintain, verify, and operate global consumer‑scale systems.
• Standards Through Code
  Golden path implementations, libraries, and templates you build are the default starting point for new services across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu, eliminating redundant foundational work at the team level.
• Improved Engineering Velocity
  DORA metrics show measurable improvement in deployment frequency and lead time as teams stop rebuilding infrastructure and start shipping features on top of your platform services.
• Cost Visibility & Efficiency
  Every service has clear cost attribution and observability, enabling informed scaling and investment decisions at the VP and EVP levels. Platform primitives embed cost metrics by default.
• Reliability Improvement
  Incidents caused by integration gaps, verification failures, improperly implemented distributed patterns, or insufficient load testing materially decrease as teams adopt platform standards and tooling.
• AI‑Ready Infrastructure
  At least three production AI or ML services run on platform primitives you designed and implemented, proving that the platform is capable of supporting Disney’s AI ambitions.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a Staff, Principal, or higher‑level individual contributor role owning large‑scale systems.
• Direct experience designing, building, and operating platform or infrastructure services in an organization of 1,000+ engineers, including navigating cross‑org coordination at hyperscale.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and platforms, such as API gateways, service mesh, distributed tracing, observability platforms, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and load shedding.
• Proven track record of delivering platform services as software that achieve broad internal adoption; you understand what to build so engineers choose to use the platform.
• Hands‑on experience with service‑to‑service authentication, zero‑trust networking, and identity federation at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical architecture and platform strategy to Directors and VPs, translating system design decisions into measurable velocity, cost, and reliability outcomes.
• Experience leading teams through build‑versus‑buy decisions for platform‑level capabilities, including prototyping, vendor evaluation, and long‑term ownership considerations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a hyperscaler or large consumer technology company (e.g., Google, Meta, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, or equivalent) with platform engineering, and small company experience as well.
• Prior work building infrastructure that AI or ML systems depend on, such as inference routing, feature stores, model telemetry, or experiment tracking.
• Background in streaming media infrastructure: CDN integration, live event architecture, and high‑concurrency content delivery systems.
• Experience defining and governing SLO frameworks, error budgets, and production readiness standards across a large engineering organization.

Required Education

• Related Bachelor’s Degree or Higher

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $239,700 - $321,400 per year, and for New York City is $239,700 - $321,400, and for San Francisco, CA is $250,500 - $335,900. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long‑term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.