Description
Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organisation 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.
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.
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 organisations, influence Directors and VPs, and make decisions that materially shape the platform strategy.
- Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers across the organisation 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.