Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Business:
Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Date posted:
Dec. 08, 2025

Location:

Glendale, California;
San Francisco, California;
New York, New York;
Seattle, Washington

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.

Our 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.

The Application Player Engineering team mission is to design video streaming playback solutions in collaboration with UI, encoding, packaging, and delivery teams to optimize the Disney streaming technology stack for the best streaming experience possible on all platforms. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer who will create global feature‑rich, standardized streaming media playback solutions on cross‑functional devices including Apple, Android, Roku, and web technologies.

Our intention is to design and develop a layered architecture for media playback that can span all Disney direct‑to‑consumer brands like Disney+, ESPN and Hulu. Your focus will be on creating solutions to scale for players, collaborating with media playback teams on other platforms to ensure a consistent software architecture that delivers a best‑in‑class streaming experience for your viewers while providing a foundation for media playback innovation at Disney.

It is a hands‑on engineering position for Application Player Engineering across a variety of streaming technologies. You will apply technical expertise to create solutions that scale, manage project priorities, deliverables and design and enhance software solutions surrounding media technology to scale. You will architect reusable solutions that will be shared across Disney experiences. You may lead others to solve complex problems and provide oversight and direction to other software engineers.

You enjoy working with other teams and technologies to understand their constraints, enjoy the challenges of difficult problems, and take pride in solutions that balance design constraints, technical constraints, and the end experience of users. You foster trust, approach problems with empathy and respect, and embrace creativity.

This is a hybrid role requiring 4 days onsite (Monday‑Thursday) in the following office locations:

• Glendale, CA
• New York, NY
• Seattle, WA
• San Francisco, CA

• Design and implement solutions for new features which integrate with various Disney media services and back‑ends.
• Collaborative API design with peer teams on the back‑end as well as front‑end teams which depend on our libraries.
• Research and development for media playback experiences,…