Principal Software Engineer – Observability

The Walt Disney Company

Principal engineer building AI-powered observability, telemetry, and autonomous agent systems for Disney’s streaming platforms. Improving reliability and developer productivity across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN.

Posted 8/13/2026full-timeNew York City • California, New York • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $184,300 - $258,900 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing and operating AI-driven systems, optimizing performance and costs, and building scalable APIs. Proficient in software engineering best practices, including CI/CD, while mentoring engineers and enhancing system reliability across large-scale streaming platforms.

Highest-signal resume keywords

AI/ML Engineering ExperienceModel Prompting and Context EngineeringBuilding Scalable APIsCloud Deployment on AWS, Azure, or GCPSoftware Engineering Best Practices

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Software EngineeringAI-Powered ApplicationsData-Driven ApplicationsAPI DesignMicroservices ArchitectureModel RoutingPrompt OptimizationError RecoveryMulti-Agent OrchestrationFoundation Models

Soft Skills

Mentoring EngineersTroubleshooting IssuesExplaining Complex Concepts

Tools & Technologies

GitHubDockerAWS/EKSCI/CD PipelinesCursorClaude CodeOpenTelemetryDatabricksSnowflakePySpark

Certifications & Qualifications

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Industry Keywords

Streaming PlatformsObservability SaaSTelemetry DataProduction SystemsAutonomous Agentic Workflows

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSAzureCloudDockerGoogle Cloud PlatformMicroservicesPandasPySparkSDLC

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design and operate production-grade intelligent systems using real-time signals and AI-driven detection to improve streaming platform, critical service, and customer experience health
Build and scale autonomous agentic systems using frontier models for detection, root cause analysis, and resolution
Design AI harnesses, memory, multi-agent orchestration, prompting, context strategies, retrieval, tool routing, and error recovery
Develop front-end and back-end systems, data and decisioning pipelines, and scalable APIs delivering predictive signals, explainability, and insights
Optimize AI costs and performance through prompt/context optimization, caching, batching, and model routing
Apply software engineering best practices, including tested code, code reviews, and CI/CD, while owning production components
Modernize unfamiliar codebases with AI and embed intelligence into incident response, release validation, and customer insights workflows
Set technical direction, conduct design and code reviews, and raise the engineering bar
Improve reliability, observability, and developer productivity across Disney’s large-scale streaming ecosystem, including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN

Requirements

What you’ll need

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
10+ years of software engineering experience
Experience building AI-powered or data-driven applications, scalable APIs, and production systems at scale
Ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar codebases and modernize systems with AI while maintaining quality
Expertise in model prompting, context engineering, harnessing, orchestration patterns, and autonomous agentic workflows
Strong AI/ML engineering experience with foundation models and frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph
Experience building front-end and back-end systems on AWS, Azure, or GCP and integrating frontier model APIs
Fluency with AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor and Claude Code
Experience optimizing AI usage for cost and performance through prompt optimization, caching, and model routing
Experience with GitHub, Docker, AWS/EKS, cloud-native deployments, and mature CI/CD pipelines
Strong understanding of API design, microservices architecture, and SDLC workflows
Ability to work independently, set technical direction, mentor engineers, troubleshoot issues, and explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders
Preferred: experience with observability SaaS and high-volume telemetry data, OpenTelemetry, AWS Bedrock, locally or privately hosted open-source models, PySpark, Pandas, Databricks, Snowflake, prompt evaluation, and foundation-model fine-tuning

Benefits

Comp & perks

A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package
Medical, financial, and/or other benefits