Principal Software Engineer - Rust/C++

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.

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.

Job Summary:

The Hulu Client Engineering team is looking for a Principal Engineer to provide strong, hands-on technical leadership for a team of engineers as you work together to extend, evolve, improve, and support two of our in-production multi-platform native runtimes. These native runtimes host a web-based client app across a variety of living-room platforms and devices, and you will have a unique opportunity to help set the vision for a technical strategy for these runtimes. Your high-level goals will include improving end-user experience and migrating to new platforms/devices. You will need to address challenges including performance, stability, observability, security, cross-device support, devices with very limited resources, and improving developer experience. This role requires tenacity and resilience, thriving in a fast-paced environment with minimal or ambiguous direction, being self-directed, and balancing competing technical priorities.

***This is an onsite position, four (4) days a week, and must sit in one of our technology offices above***

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Bring advanced native engineering skills to be a critical member and technical leader of a team of engineers responsible for two of our multi-platform native runtimes
• Help define a roadmap and technical direction for these runtimes that power Hulu across many living room device models
• Architect, design, build, and improve functionality at the core of these native frameworks, including leading high-level architectural discussions and planning sessions, especially around the improvement of software observability
• Review code from the team and provide technical feedback and guidance, as well as writing some key code yourself
• Collaborate closely with other Disney teams, including our Hulu living room client engineering team, media player engineering teams, services engineering teams, product managers, and design teams, and help understand and explain device limitations and requirements
• Work with hardware manufacturing partners to vet new hardware from a client application perspective

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• Candidates should have 10+ years of C/C++ experience on large codebases
• Experience with creating technical roadmaps and providing technical direction, leadership, guidance, and feedback to a team of engineers
• Hands-on experience with performance and memory profiling, tuning, and optimization, preferably on resource-constrained devices
• Strong knowledge of software architecture and design patterns
• Expertise working with versions of C++ both before and after C++11
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with embedded systems and/or writing portable multi-platform code on resource constrained systems
• Experience in designing and implementing software observability instrumentation in a large production codebase, and using the resulting observability data to identify and resolve stability and performance issues
• Experience with the internals of browser technology such as WebKit, Chromium, Cobalt, etc
• Experience/interest in leveraging AI tooling/agents creatively to accelerate development velocity on large codebases
• Graphics experience with OpenGL/EGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, Metal, etc
• Understanding of cross-device dependency management, and experience using build runners/compilation tools for multi-platform projects
• Some familiarity with streaming video (DASH or HLS protocol), codecs, and DRM

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree or better in Computer Science or a related technical field or equivalent job experience

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA is $188,400 - $252,600, Seattle, WA / New York, NY is $197,400 - $264,700 per year and in San Francisco, CA is $206,400 - $276,700 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.