Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

Job  
Location Glendale, California, United States / San Francisco, California, United States / New York, New York, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States

Business Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Date posted Feb. 02, 2026

Job Summary

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 – 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.

Role Location
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, integration, and testing.
• Project planning and team management.
• Track dependencies as related to current projects, raise concerns when dependencies are not in an expected state.
• Participate in project estimation and resource planning.
• Ability to collaborate in productive development teams as well as the larger engineering organization.
• Identify patterns that can help teams scale, create well-documented proposals, and drive adoption of those patterns.
• Challenge current architectural choices while collaborating to solve problems in innovative ways.
• Drive adoption of consistent technical frameworks across the organization.

• Minimum of 10 years of related work experience in Software Engineering crafting large-scale technologies. Strong programming skills in Java, C++, or other object-oriented language and a strong grasp of computer science fundamentals.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Broad experience and perspective on problem-solving.
• Fluent in programming paradigms including Object Oriented and Reactive.
• Champion cross-team projects.
• Coach and mentor other team-mates to ensure that all software utilizes industry best practices.
• Collaborate efficiently with Product Management, Technical Program Management, Operations, and other Engineering teams to capture requirements, drive implementation, and provide transparency to stakeholders.
• Extensive experience working and implementing Design Patterns.
• Expertise with unit test frameworks and continuous integration systems.

• Experience with streaming technology frameworks across multiple platforms.
• Experience with streaming technologies including HLS, MPEG-DASH, Transport Stream, and CMAF
• Experience directly managing or mentoring a team.

The hiring…