Principal Software Engineer

Job Posting Title:

Principal Software Engineer

Req ID:

10142056

Job Description:

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

As part of Ad Platform Engineering, the programmatic teams build and maintain Disney’s programmatic advertising suite of products and services that comprise Disney's Real-time Ad Exchange (DRAX). DRAX is an award-winning, proprietary SSP that enables the configuration of programmatic deals and integrates programmatic demand from multiple third-party sources into the Disney ad server in real time.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will apply your experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems, and leadership skills to help teams innovate and create scalable, performant, maintainable, loosely coupled, encapsulated, and testable software and systems.

Daily, you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and organizations.
• Demonstrated ownership and expertise in the projects delivered by our teams.
• Proficiency in designing and implementing robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• A perpetual drive to advocate for and contribute to the evolution of technical standards and architectural best practices.
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast-paced environment.
• A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.
• Knowledge of relevant technologies and their potential application within our systems.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements to our services using dedicated research time.
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• Your unique view and experience.

Responsibilities and Expectations:

• Own and orchestrate the implementation of innovative and complex projects spanning multiple cross-functional teams and components.
• Mentor and inspire colleagues in all aspects of enterprise software engineering, including software and system design.
• Interpret product requirements and collaborate with team leads to break them down into actionable implementation tasks and drive execution.
• Design, implement, and review code and unit tests.
• Design robust, scalable, fault tolerant, de-coupled and performant distributed systems.
• Evaluate code and test implementations to ensure best practices and optimal performance.
• Improve system observability by implementing comprehensive metrics, monitoring, and alerting solutions.
• Research, prototype, and recommend innovative solutions to optimize ad serving systems by improving efficiency, maintainability, and feature deployment speed.
• Define, review, and document software and system architectures, focusing on high-throughput, low-latency microservices.
• Understanding and use of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.
• Provide on-call engineering support as needed.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering or relevant work experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong foundation in computer science principles, including data structures and algorithms.
• Advanced proficiency with Java, such as understanding heap, multi-threading, garbage collection, profiling.
• Demonstrable analytical / problem-solving / design skills in a highly distributed and highly available services ecosystem.
• Excellent communication, collaboration skills, and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Comprehensive experience with:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects
• Non-relational database technologies e.g. DynamoDB
• Caching datastores such as Redis, ValKey, or MemCache
• Data streaming systems such as AWS Kinesis Data Stream and/or Apache Kafka
• AWS or any other cloud platform
• Observability tooling (logs, metrics, etc)
• Modern DevOps tools such as Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Domain knowledge in the ad tech industry
• Domain knowledge in programmatic advertising

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, California is $188,400 to $252,600 per year, Santa Monica, California is $188,400 to $252,600 per year, and in Seattle, Washington is $197,400 to $264,700 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. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

Job Posting Segment:

Ad Platforms

Job Posting Primary Business:

AP - Engineering

Primary Job Posting Category:

Software Engineer

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Glendale, CA, USA

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

USA - CA - 2450 Broadway, USA - WA - 925 4th Ave

Date Posted:

2026-02-17