Sr Principal Software Engineer

About the Role

As a Senior Principal Software Engineer, Platform Services, you will design, implement, and evolve the end‑to‑end architecture and software for Disney’s streaming platform services layer. This layer is foundational to how engineers across Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu deliver features, ensuring reliability and scalability at a global level. Reporting to the VP Software Engineering - Reliability, this individual contributor role owns the technical vision and core software implementations for platform services used by 400+ engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Technical Architecture & Software Implementation: Design, implement, and own the technical architecture and core software components for Disney’s platform services layer, including API gateway, service-to-service authentication, rate limiting, distributed tracing, observability, and experimentation platforms.
• Standards, Golden Paths & Technical Governance: Produce architecture decision records (ADRs), technical design docs, and platform RFCs. Define and maintain golden path templates and tooling to ensure best practices are adopted by default.
• Platform Strategy, Integration & Delivery: Review and approve service designs and platform integrations, partner with engineering leaders to translate architecture into executable roadmaps, and evaluate build-versus-buy decisions.
• Reliability, Performance & Operations Engineering: Lead investigations into complex production issues, design platform-level resiliency patterns, and ensure excellent telemetry and alerting for platform services.
• AI-Ready Platform Services: Ensure platform primitives support AI and ML systems, including inference routing, model telemetry, and experiment tracking.
• Leadership, Influence & Mentorship: Operate as an executive-level individual contributor, mentor senior engineers, and communicate platform strategy to leadership.

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 services in an organization of 1,000+ engineers.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and platforms, such as API gateways, service mesh, and observability platforms.
• Proven track record of delivering platform services that achieve broad internal adoption.
• Hands-on experience with service-to-service authentication and zero-trust networking.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical architecture and platform strategy to senior leadership.
• Experience leading build-versus-buy decisions for platform capabilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a hyperscaler or large consumer technology company (e.g., Google, Meta, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft) with platform engineering.
• Prior work building infrastructure for AI/ML systems.
• Background in streaming media infrastructure (CDN integration, live event architecture, etc.).
• Experience defining and governing SLO frameworks and production readiness standards.

Education

Bachelor’s Degree or Higher in a related field.

Pay

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $239,700 - $321,400 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.