Principal Software Engineer

About The Role & Team

At The Walt Disney Company, we’re building what strives to be the largest media streaming platform in the world, serving not just Disney+, but also ESPN+ and Hulu. Every day is a moment to make a difference for hundreds of millions of people around the world!

Our team members all contribute to a dynamic, inclusive, and self-motivated culture, and are responsible for the full development, delivery, and operational support of critical global services. We have a mature DevOps culture and collaborate on all areas of the technology stack: including UI, backend services, real-time data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

We’re looking for people who want to challenge themselves, to grow; people who understand scale and care deeply about reliability. You will be surrounded by colleagues eager to help you succeed and be part of an ambitious, rewarding culture.

As part of the Experimentation & User Experience team, you'll be working on high throughput globally distributed systems, with areas including Stream Concurrency & Impression tracking, A/B Testing, Feature Flagging, and User Cohort Targeting.

What You Will Do

As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll:

• Be hands-on, working with engineers across multiple global teams, often leading proof of concept designs and providing guidance to prove out ideas that define the forward-looking technological direction.
• Influence the roadmap for multiple teams, working in partnership with your peers and partners across Product, Project Management, and Engineering.
• Understand the strategic business goals of the organization and use this to guide cross-team solutions, architecture, and priorities that bring significant business value without unnecessary technical complexity or risk.
• Be present in cross-organizational discussions, representing engineers within your teams. Use your knowledge to proactively identify and document architectural gaps and focus areas.
• Contribute to an inclusive culture that values learning and development, close collaboration between team members, and strives for excellence.
• Mentor engineers across teams to help them improve their technical abilities and build their profiles within and outside of the organization.

Things We’re Looking For

We don’t expect candidates to be strong in all areas - these are not barriers to entry. Strength in some areas and an appetite to learn and improve is what we're interested in!

• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems with multi-level failover & fallback strategies.
• Understanding of product architecture, high-quality coding, testing, and development practices.
• In-depth experience of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) language such as Java, Scala, or Kotlin.
• Experience with at least one of the following cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Compute (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling.
• Experience in gaining alignment across multiple teams in order to deliver significant products or features.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, specifically in understanding, framing, and simplifying both technical & business requirements.
• Comfort with ambiguity and leading conversations where discordant views are present.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Minimum 10+ years related work experience.

The Interview Process

We view interviewing as a two-way process and take a relaxed, practical approach that reflects how our teams work together daily. This involves reviewing code, pair programming, and solving an architectural problem together. We’ll conclude with a non-technical interview where we’ll both spend time understanding what it will be like working with each other.

Compensation

The hiring range for this position in New York is $189,300 - $253,800 per year. 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.