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Sr Principal Software Engineer

The Walt Disney Company
Seattle, USA
Full-time
Senior · 12+ years experience
Onsite
Discovered 3 weeks ago

Full Job Posting

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 organizations, influence Directors and VPs, and make decisions that materially shape the platform strategy.
  • Mentor Principal and Senior Engineers across the organization 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.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

  • 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a Staff, Principal, or higher‐level individual contributor role owning large‐scale systems.
  • Direct experience designing, building, and operating platform or infrastructure services in an organization of 1,000+ engineers, including navigating cross‐org coordination at hyperscale.
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems and platforms, such as API gateways, service mesh, distributed tracing, observability platforms, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and load shedding.
  • Proven 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.
  • Hands‐on experience with service‐to‐service authentication, zero‐trust networking, and identity federation at scale.
  • Demonstrated ability to communicate technical architecture and platform strategy to Directors and VPs, translating system design decisions into measurable velocity, cost, and reliability outcomes.
  • Experience leading teams through build‐versus‐buy decisions for platform‐level capabilities, including prototyping, vendor evaluation, and long‐term ownership considerations.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience 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.
  • Prior work building infrastructure that AI or ML systems depend on, such as inference routing, feature stores, model telemetry, or experiment tracking.
  • Background in streaming media infrastructure: CDN integration, live event architecture, or high‐concurrency content delivery systems.
  • Experience defining and governing SLO frameworks, error budgets, and production readiness standards across a large engineering organization.
  • Required Education
  • Related Bachelor’s Degree or Higher
  • Job Posting Segment:
  • Job Posting Primary Business:
  • Primary Job Posting Category:
  • Employment Type:
  • Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:
  • Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:
  • Date Posted:

Qualifications

  • 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a Staff, Principal, or higher‐level individual contributor role owning large‐scale systems.
  • Direct experience designing, building, and operating platform or infrastructure services in an organization of 1,000+ engineers, including navigating cross‐org coordination at hyperscale.
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems and platforms, such as API gateways, service mesh, distributed tracing, observability platforms, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and load shedding.
  • Proven 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.
  • Hands‐on experience with service‐to‐service authentication, zero‐trust networking, and identity federation at scale.
  • Demonstrated ability to communicate technical architecture and platform strategy to Directors and VPs, translating system design decisions into measurable velocity, cost, and reliability outcomes.
  • Experience leading teams through build‐versus‐buy decisions for platform‐level capabilities, including prototyping, vendor evaluation, and long‐term ownership considerations.
  • Experience 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.
  • Prior work building infrastructure that AI or ML systems depend on, such as inference routing, feature stores, model telemetry, or experiment tracking.
  • Background in streaming media infrastructure: CDN integration, live event architecture, or high‐concurrency content delivery systems.
  • Experience defining and governing SLO frameworks, error budgets, and production readiness standards across a large engineering organization.
  • Required Education
  • Related Bachelor’s Degree or Higher
  • Date Posted

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