Principal Software Engineer - Ad Experiences

Job Summary:

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

The Ad Experiences Fleet aims to unleash the magic of Disney by leveraging cutting-edge creative tools and fostering creative innovation to craft captivating, interactive ad experiences that deeply resonate with consumers and deliver superior value for our advertisers while enhancing the viewer experience to maximize revenue.

As part of our team, you’ll develop and own systems that enable rapid prototyping, testing, and validation of interactive ad formats with real viewers and advertisers—fueling innovation and revenue growth across our CTV platforms. These experiences are then integrated into creative platforms also owned by the Fleet leading to new ad experiences available to all ad tier users.

As our team's Principal Software Engineer, you will apply your battle-tested experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems, and leadership skills to help teams create scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable systems.

Daily, you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and organizations.
• Demonstrated ownership and expertise in the projects delivered by our teams.
• Proficiency in designing and implementing robust, scalable, tolerant distributed systems, as well as in advocating best practices to fellow engineers.
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast-paced environment.
• A proven ability to work with product teams to influence and translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as the ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.
• Possess knowledge of relevant technologies and their potential applications within our systems, and be able to articulate their pros and cons.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements to our services using dedicated research time.
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• Your unique view and experience.

Responsibilities and Expectations:

• Writing some and reviewing a lot of code and tests.
• Reviewing code and test implementations for best practices and algorithmic complexity.
• Available to support engineers on an On-Call shift, when needed.
• Reading requirements documentation from Product, providing a perspective on feasibility and translating into implementation tasks, and partnering with teams’ leads through execution as needed.
• Exploring, researching, implementing proofs-of-concept, and proposing solutions that will improve Ad Serving systems (reduce cost and overhead, improve maintainability, minimize the time features take to be in production, etc).
• Defining, reviewing, and documenting software and system designs in a high throughput, low latency microservices environment.
• Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors, and alerts.
• Foster open communication during architectural discussions, confidently defending decisions while welcoming feedback.
• Bridge the gap between diverse team requirements and technical capabilities to deliver cohesive, scalable solutions.
• Mentoring and inspiring others in all aspects of professional software development.