Principal Software Engineer - Java

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:

1.    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.

2.    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. 

3.    Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Job Summary

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, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be part of a diverse and talented organization focused on building and maintaining complex sports platform services and applications for ESPN.  You will be a member of a team creating the world’s #1 sports products working with modern server-side platform frameworks and services such as Spring Boot, MongoDB and Apache Kafka. Beyond performing daily responsibilities working on our team, you will have opportunities to contribute innovative ideas for our product and learn more about the services that allow ESPN to scale and perform. 

Responsibilities 

• Provide platform production support for a complex distributed system that delivers historical and live sports data to Web, Mobile and Living Room devices.

• Partner with other engineering teams to solve complex problems while considering performance, scalability, caching, resiliency, and flexibility for expanding product requirements

• Design, Develop and Document architectural platform frameworks for shared solutions across teams.

• Lead code and architectural reviews

• Competitive backend industry research 

Basic Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

• 10+ years relevant industry experience

• Mastery of backend platform development  technologies and principles

• Mastery of software architectural patterns

• Extensive experience with Cloud-based architecture

• Extensive experience with Java, Kotlin,  Rust, Go or other system level languages

• Experience with task Automation (GitLab Pipelines, GitHub Actions, TeamCity)

• Experience with multiple database technologies such as Mysql, Postgresql, RDS, Casandra, Mongo, etc.

• Experience using enterprise-grade frameworks such as Spring Boot.

• Strong communication skills and attention to detail

• Ability to research, learn and evangelize new technologies

Preferred Qualifications 

• Understanding of AWS services (e.g., ECS Cloudwatch, EC2, S3, etc) 

• Experience building and integrating AI and LLM technologies