Sr Principal Software Engineer

Job Posting Title: Sr Principal Software Engineer Req ID: 10159602 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. 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