Principal Software Engineer - ESPN+

Job Posting Title:

Principal Software Engineer - ESPN+

Req ID:

10122415

Job Description:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

This role involves building and maintaining both the personalized content recommendation engine that primarily powers ESPN, as well as our in-house A/B testing solution that lets us experiment efficiently. This complex system is built on a foundation of big data pipelines that bring together data about millions of users and thousands of new pieces of content daily. In addition, we have several real-time systems that enable our algorithms to be adaptable to the constantly changing sports news landscape. On top of this foundation, we blend simple algorithms together with complex ML to deliver real-time recommendations at scale.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer who is passionate about developing high performance data platforms. To be successful in this role, you need effective communication and collaboration skills, a passion for learning and trying new things, and a strong foundational understanding of programming and computer science. You cannot be afraid to get your hands dirty. We are looking for someone to take ownership of many of the data engineering pieces of our system, take on infrastructure and operations tasks, as well as get involved in our ML and A/B testing efforts. We are a small, effective, agile team run by startup veterans.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Work with a distributed team of engineers across multiple products building software collaboratively.

• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects Collaborate with business partners to understand and refine requirements

• Eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel

• Ramp up quickly on existing software to deliver incremental, integrated solutions in a complex environment

• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions

• Participate in the code review process by assessing pull requests

• Support systems and services during production incidents as part of the on-call rotation Author and recommend technical proposals and root cause analyses

• Provide mentoring and advice for other specialists

• Establish engineering practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:
Basic Qualifications:

• Expert in Python and SQL skills processing big datasets.

• A strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.)

• Experience with at least one major MPP or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query, Databricks)

• You are a problem solver with strong attention to detail and excellent analytical and communication skills

• In-depth experience with Cloud technologies like AWS (S3, ECS, EMR, EC2, Lambda, etc.) Experience using source control systems and CI/CD pipeline

Preferred Qualifications:

• Expert in Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices

• Solid experience with data integration toolsets (i.e Airflow), CI/CD

Experience with:

• Minimum of 10 years of related big data engineering experience modeling and developing large data pipelines and platforms

Required Education  

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

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in New York is $193,100.00 - $258,900 per year and in San Francisco, CA $201,900.00 - $270,700.00 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:

Product & Data Engineering

Job Posting Primary Business:

PDE - Engagement Experiences & Platforms

Primary Job Posting Category:

Software Engineer

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

New York, NY, USA

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

USA - CA - Market St

Date Posted:

2025-06-10