Principal Software Engineer - Observability
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 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, and the engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.
The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming’s distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly.
Job Summary
As a Principal Software Engineer, you are a forward-thinking, highly technical, hands-on-keyboard builder. You work alongside diverse codebases, teams, and subject matter experts to accelerate software engineering practices with AI, shipping production code for our products and applications across the enterprise in a fast-paced, modern engineering environment, with a strong understanding of application observability.
You will design and build intelligent systems that improve the reliability and performance of Disney’s large distributed streaming platform, including fully autonomous systems and real-time pipelines that turn telemetry, logs, and user signals into automated analysis, root cause detection, and proactive insights across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN.
You operate with independence and a strong innovation bias, scoping your own work, making sound tradeoff decisions, and tying everything you build to clear business value and security approvals. You use front-end AI models as a force multiplier to deliver well above average engineering output while keeping token and compute costs rational through optimization and smart route selection. You have a strong desire to work as a technical lead, setting direction and raising the engineering bar through design and code reviews.
Responsibilities
- Design and operate intelligent, production-grade systems that use real-time signals and AI-driven detection to improve the health of streaming platforms and services.
- Build and scale fully autonomous systems powered by modern AI models (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta) that reason over complex system behavior, decide and act with minimal human intervention, and drive detection and resolution.
- Design intelligent harnesses, memory, and multi-agent orchestration patterns – including prompting and context strategies, task decomposition, retrieval, tool routing, and error recovery – to maximize model performance and reduce model inaccuracies.
- Develop integrated systems across front end and back end, including data and decisioning pipelines, and scalable APIs that deliver predictions and insights to engineering teams and stakeholders.
- Keep AI usage cost-effective through prompt optimization, caching, batching, and intelligent model routing across external APIs and self-hosted models.
- Apply engineering best practices end to end: clean, tested code, code reviews, and mature CI/CD, owning components of production systems.
- Drop into new or unfamiliar codebases, build a working model, and modernize them with AI, partnering cross-functionally to embed intelligence into workflows and drive productivity.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including building AI-powered or data-driven applications and scalable APIs (e.g., FastAPI, Flask) and deploying production systems.
- Proven ability to quickly onboard and enhance systems with AI at scale, while maintaining quality, with tangible examples of productivity gains.
- Demonstrated expertise in system design, context engineering, and orchestration patterns.
- Strong AI/ML experience, including orchestrating models (e.g., Claude, OpenAI, Qwen) using frameworks such as LangChain.
- Proven track record building and deploying high-quality systems across both front end and back end on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), integrating models.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools, and optimizing AI for cost and performance.
- Experience with modern development practices: version control (GitHub), containerization (Docker), cloud-native deployments, and CI/CD.
- Strong understanding of API design, microservices architecture, and standard SDLC workflows.
- Track record of independent work and delivering high-impact outcomes, with ability to direction.
- Strong analytical and technical skills to troubleshoot issues and solve problems.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively across technical and non-technical teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building SaaS solutions in observability and handling high-volume telemetry data (e.g., Datadog, Grafana). Familiarity with OpenTelemetry is a bonus.
- Experience integrating with enterprise AI services such as AWS Bedrock.
- Experience deploying and serving open-source models in private infrastructure, including optimization.
- Familiarity with large-scale data platforms and distributed data processing tools (e.g., PySpark, Databricks, Snowflake).
- Knowledge of prompt design, model evaluation, and fine-tuning models (e.g., Claude, GPT).
- Experience building production-grade systems in a fast-paced, distributed environment.
About Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology
At Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology, we blend imagination and innovation to reimagine how people engage with stories and products. We create amazing experiences, transform the future of media, and build platforms that connect people everywhere to stories and sports.