Principal Software Engineer

Department/Group Overview:

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:

• 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.

Content Platforms & Operations is responsible for the development and ongoing advancement of the technical and operational functions driving the worldwide distribution and monetization of Disney’s linear networks and theatrical content. This includes Disney’s media supply chain and storage, network and theatrical distribution operations, media localization, network transmission and origination, and more. The global team also plays a critical role as the primary collaboration point for Product & Technology with Disney’s EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regional business teams.

Job Summary:

As the Principal Software Engineer for the Rights & Accounting team within Content Platforms, you will serve as a senior technical leader, driving engineering standards, leading architecture decisions across teams, and shaping department technical strategy. You will remain deeply hands-on, solving complex technical challenges and partnering with engineers and stakeholders to improve the scalability, reliability, and maintainability of our platforms.

Your initial major mandate will be to lead the regression test automation program, beginning with a pilot application and scaling successful approaches across other applications. You will establish the quality engineering and automation standards for the organization while mentoring engineers and driving sustained, team-owned quality practices across teams

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

General

• Own and drive engineering standards and best practices across teams, setting the bar through architecture, design, and code reviews.
• Lead architectural decisions for complex solutions spanning multiple teams and systems, emphasizing scalability, resiliency, reuse, extensibility, and maintainability.
• Maintain a deep, hands-on understanding of core systems and their upstream and downstream dependencies, using that knowledge to anticipate technical risks and guide solution design.
• Write and review production code, tackle complex technical problems, and work directly with engineers to ensure solutions meet business, product, and architectural requirements.
• Shape department technical strategy and planning, identifying opportunities to improve architecture, engineering effectiveness, and long-term platform health.

Quality Engineering & Test Automation:

• Own the quality engineering and automated regression strategy for Rights & Accounting, beginning with the pilot application and scaling successful approaches across application teams.
• Establish measurable baselines and targets for test coverage, stability, runtime, and overall suite health, using quality and production data to prioritize improvements.
• Lead the stabilization and optimization of automated test suites, reducing flakiness and execution time while eliminating brittle, redundant, or low-value tests.
• Expand automated coverage across the appropriate testing layers, prioritizing high-risk workflows, integration points, and recurring production issues.
• Define scalable test automation architecture, engineering standards, and CI/CD quality practices that make automated testing maintainable, reusable, and actionable.
• Drive adoption and sustained team ownership of quality practices by partnering across engineering and DevOps, mentoring engineers, and embedding testability and quality into design and development.
• Any other duties needed to help achieve Business Objectives.



Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial hands-on experience in test automation and quality engineering for large-scale, distributed, cloud-based systems.
• Proven record of owning and leading large, complex, cross-team engineering efforts from definition through delivery, with measurable outcomes.
• Deep expertise in test automation methodology and frameworks across the test pyramid, including unit, API/contract, integration, and end-to-end testing (e.g., JUnit/TestNG, Pytest, Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, REST Assured, Pact).
• Demonstrated expertise diagnosing and eliminating test flakiness, including non-determinism, timing and asynchronous behavior, shared state, and test data and environment isolation.
• Hands-on experience improving suite performance through parallel and distributed execution, test sharding, risk-based or impact-based test selection, and test data management.
• Strong command of CI/CD pipelines and quality gates (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), including flake detection, quarantine workflows, and test-health reporting and observability.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: mastery of at least one modern language (Java/Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript/JavaScript), API design and RESTful services, asynchronous programming models, and clean, maintainable code.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures and tooling (e.g., AWS EC2, SQS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, Fargate, CloudFormation/Terraform) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), including testing services in those environments.
• Data-driven approach to quality: able to define coverage, flake-rate, and runtime metrics, build dashboards, and use production incident data to prioritize work.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow senior and lead engineers, and to influence engineering practices across teams without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to articulate complex technical trade-offs to engineering leadership and non-technical partners, and influence others through well-reasoned explanations.
• Motivated self-starter who is comfortable operating with ambiguity, establishing baselines where none exist, and adapting to new technologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading a quality-ownership transition (e.g., from a centralized QA function to team-owned, engineer-driven quality) across multiple teams.
• Experience with contract testing, performance and load testing (e.g., k6, Gatling, JMeter), and resilience or chaos testing.
• Experience with observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Splunk) to connect test signals to production health.
• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to test generation, triage, or maintenance, and evangelizing its responsible adoption across teams.
• Experience in media, content supply chain, or streaming platforms.

Required Education 

• BS in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

PAY TRANSPARENCY

The hiring range for this position in California is $ 191,300.00 to $ 256,500.00 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.

This position is with Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

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Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

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