{"id":2587112,"url":"https://alion.io/job/walt-disney-company-sr-principal-software-engineer","title":"Sr Principal Software Engineer","company":{"id":4283,"name":"Walt Disney Company","domain":"disney.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/walt-disney-company","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":68,"ghost_share":0.029,"stale_share":0.735,"repost_share":0.029,"time_to_fill_p50_days":20,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Seattle, United States","San Francisco, United States","New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":243300,"max":326200,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":326200},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":false},{"name":"API Gateway","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"SRE","optional":false},{"name":"Zero Trust","optional":false},{"name":"Feature Store","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-14T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-14","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T20:55:42Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":22,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":22},"description":"Job Posting Title:\nSr Principal Software EngineerReq ID:\n10159602Job Description:\nDisney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology\nTechnology 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.\nThe 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.\nHere are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:\nBuilding 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.\nProduct 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.\nWithin 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.\nWe 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.\nJob Summary:\nAs 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:\nHow fast all engineers across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu deliver features\nHow reliably those features operate at global scale\nHow confidently teams can build on shared infrastructure instead of reinventing it\nReporting 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.\nYou 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.\nResponsibilities and Duties of the Role:\nTechnical Architecture & Software Implementation\nDesign, implement, and own the technical architecture and core software components for Disney’s platform services layer, including:API gateway and edge services\nService-to-service authentication and authorization\nRate limiting, load shedding, and circuit breaking\nDistributed tracing, telemetry capture, and logging pipelines\nUser identity sharing and cross-service context propagation\nObservability and experimentation platforms\n\nWrite, review, and ship production-grade code for shared libraries, services, SDKs, CLI tools, and golden-path templates that are adopted by 400+ teams.\nProduce reference implementations and starter kits that embody platform standards and patterns, so teams can adopt best practices by default.\nStandards, Golden Paths & Technical Governance\nProduce architecture decision records (ADRs), technical design docs, and platform RFCs that guide delivery teams and establish durable institutional standards.\nDefine and maintain golden path templates and tooling that make the “correct” implementation the easiest path for teams consuming platform services.\nEstablish 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.\nPlatform Strategy, Integration & Delivery\nReview and approve service designs and platform integrations before they enter the build phase, resolving cross-domain technical dependencies before they become delivery blockers.\nPartner with Directors of Platform Engineering and Site Reliability to translate architecture into executable quarterly roadmaps, with clear milestones and ownership for software delivery.\nEvaluate build-versus-buy decisions with rigor, including prototyping, integration spikes, and cost modeling; quantify total cost of ownership, integration risk, and long-term maintainability.\nReliability, Performance & Operations Engineering\nLead deep technical investigations into complex production issues across distributed systems, including cross-service performance bottlenecks, cascading failures, and resiliency gaps.\nDesign and implement platform-level resiliency patterns (e.g., retries, bulkheads, fallback strategies) into shared libraries and services so teams inherit reliability by default.\nPartner with SRE and observability teams to ensure platform services have excellent telemetry, dashboards, and alerting, and that incidents drive improvements to the platform itself.\nAI-Ready Platform Services\nEnsure 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\nModel telemetry and monitoring\nExperiment tracking and feature-flagging for models and AI-powered experiences\n\nCollaborate with AI/ML teams to build reusable software components and patterns that accelerate AI workloads on the platform.\nLeadership, Influence & Mentorship (Executive-Level IC)\nOperate as an executive-level individual contributor (P6): drive technical direction across multiple organizations, influence Directors and VPs, and make decisions that materially shape the platform strategy.\nMentor Principal and Senior Engineers across the organization through pairing, code reviews, design critiques, and architecture reviews, building the next generation of engineering leaders.\nCommunicate 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.\nHow You’ll Know You’re Successful\nOperations 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.\nStandards 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.\nImproved 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.\nCost 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.\nReliability 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.\nAI-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.\nRequired Education, Experience/Skills/Training:\n12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a Staff, Principal, or higher-level individual contributor role owning large-scale systems.\nDirect experience designing, building, and operating platform or infrastructure services in an organization of 1,000+ engineers, including navigating cross-org coordination at hyperscale.\nDeep expertise in distributed systems and platforms, such as API gateways, service mesh, distributed tracing, observability platforms, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and load shedding.\nProven track record of delivering platform services as software that achieve broad internal adoption; you understand what to build so engineers choose to use the platform.\nHands-on experience with service-to-service authentication, zero-trust networking, and identity federation at scale.\nDemonstrated ability to communicate technical architecture and platform strategy to Directors and VPs, translating system design decisions into measurable velocity, cost, and reliability outcomes.\nExperience leading teams through build-versus-buy decisions for platform-level capabilities, including prototyping, vendor evaluation, and long-term ownership considerations.\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience at a hyperscaler or large consumer technology company (e.g., Google, Meta, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, or equivalent) with platform engineering, and small company experience as well.\nPrior work building infrastructure that AI or ML systems depend on, such as inference routing, feature stores, model telemetry, or experiment tracking.\nBackground in streaming media infrastructure: CDN integration, live event architecture, or high-concurrency content delivery systems.\nExperience defining and governing SLO frameworks, error budgets, and production readiness standards across a large engineering organization.\nRequired Education\nRelated Bachelor’s Degree or Higher\nThe hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA and in New York, NY is $243,300.00 - $326,200.00 per year, and in San Francisco, CA is $254,200.00 - $341,000.00 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. 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