Description
On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future.
The Product & Data Engineering team is responsible for end-to-end development for Disney’s world-class consumer-facing products, including streaming platforms Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, and digital products & experiences across ESPN, Marvel, Disney Studios, NatGeo, and ABC News.
The ABC Core Content Technologies engineering team is looking for a Principal Product Software Engineer who is passionate about setting technical direction for high-scale content platforms and multiplying the impact of engineers across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, implementation, and delivery of software in highly ambiguous and significantly complex problem spaces that have long-term impact on our products, technology, and architecture.
- Deconstruct large architectures into components that can be developed independently by multiple teams, then align those teams toward simple, coherent designs that come together into an integrated whole.
- Acquire a deep understanding of our business processes, dependent systems, and teams, and develop professional relationships with key stakeholders , including business users, product managers, designers, and other Principal Engineers both inside and outside of our organization , to inform technical strategy and drive alignment.
- Set the standard for engineering excellence across the organization – producing designs, algorithms, and implementations that are exemplary in terms of robustness, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and simplicity – and drive best practices across the organization.
- Amplify your impact as a force multiplier: lead design reviews for complex projects, probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, foster shared understanding, handle escalations, and mitigate complexity risks.
- Actively develop and mentor engineers across and beyond your organization, keep the engineering community current on trends and technologies, participate in hiring, and perform promotion assessments to support the career growth of others.
Additional Expectations
- Promote and reinforce engineering best practices , design patterns, code review, and automated testing , and drive their adoption across the organization.
- Mentor engineers within and beyond your squad, and educate the broader engineering community on advanced technical issues, technologies, and trends.
- Lead and reinforce a high level of operational excellence for the systems underpinning applications used by millions of fans every day.
- Solicit differing views, build consensus, and be willing to change your mind as you learn more.
- Participate in hiring and interviewing, and perform promotion assessments to support the career growth of others.
- Champion the adoption of AI-assisted development tools, models, and workflows, demonstrating a personal commitment to them and helping the broader team realize measurable productivity and quality gains.
Minimum Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience building large-scale, highly available distributed services.
- Expert-level programming skills in Java or a similar object-oriented language, with strong computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.).
- Proven track record designing backend architectures that span multiple teams and driving consensus on them.
- Experience building and operating message-based, distributed systems, including caching strategies.
- Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction beyond a single team.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience working on highly scalable, real-time content or data platforms serving millions of consumers.
- Extensive experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) or a similar cloud service, including Terraform and infrastructure as code (IaC) practices.
- Experience with event-driven messaging architectures (e.g., SQS, SNS) and both relational and non-relational database technologies (e.g., DynamoDB, OpenSearch).
- Contributions to intellectual property (e.g., patents), industry conferences, or a broader technical community.