Principal Software Engineer

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:

1.    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.
2.    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. 
3.    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.

The User Foundations team builds critical User Capabilities that are shared across all experiences on the streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+. We implement reliable, high-throughput services and pipelines for gathering information about our users and delivering personalized experiences. We're a fast-paced, dynamic, collaborative and fun team, and are looking for someone who can slot right in and start delivering from day one.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance platforms. To be successful in this role, you need effective communication and collaboration skills, a passion for learning and trying new things, and a strong foundational understanding of programming and computer science.

As a member of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software.

Things you’ll be working on:

• Identity patterns that can help the teams scale, create proposals, and drive adoption of those patterns
• Challenge current architectural choices while collaborating to solve problems in innovative ways
• Drive best engineering practices to write well-constructed and easy-to-maintain code, defensive and robust tests.
• Lead through metrics - understand application performance and costs and push for better results.
• Work with Product Management to help translate business requirements into Technical solutions - drive the delivery of key projects across the various cross functional teams
• Lead architecture group to inspire change across the organization as well as partner organizations

Responsibilities:

• Develop software designs and specifications
• Develops and writes code to meet design specifications
• Test, document and deploy code
• Provide technical mentorship, and code quality assurance
• Support, maintain and break-fix production products
• Work with a team to design solutions to various interesting and challenging problems
• Be a champion for engineering excellence
• Become and stay an expert in current and emerging technologies and tools

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of related experience crafting large-scale, highly available Java services utilizing various database and messaging technologies.
• Strong programming skills in Java and other object-oriented languages, and a strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.)
• Experience using source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.
• An ability to work both independently and collaboratively.
•  Champion cross-team projects.
• Coach and mentor other specialists on the team to ensure that all software utilizes Hulu and industry best practices for data persistence and real-time streaming applications.

 
 

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York City, NY is $193,100 - $258,900 per year; the hiring range for this position in Santa Monica/Burbank/Glendale/L.A., California and in Bristol, Connecticut is $184,300 to $247,100; and the hiring range for this position in San Francisco, California is $201,900 - 270,700 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.