Principal Platform Engineer

Overview

Principal Platform Engineer, Infrastructure & Tooling for Services, Data, and GenAI

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more. We build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally, combining technology with creativity to deliver world-class products, storytelling, and scalable platforms.

We’re Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to propel the technological foundation and consumer media touchpoints serving millions worldwide.

Job summary: We’re looking for a Principal Platform Engineer, Infrastructure & Tooling for Services, Data, and GenAI to shape the future of infrastructure at Disney’s Ad Platforms. This hands-on, high-impact role leads innovation across cloud platforms that support data and software engineering teams—designing secure, scalable systems that accelerate delivery without compromising quality. You’ll drive AWS-based infrastructure architecture, champion cloud-native CI/CD practices, and build automation and internal tooling to empower developers. You’ll explore GenAI to streamline workflows and reduce repetitive tasks. You’ll collaborate with security, DevOps, SRE, and application teams to deliver platform capabilities that improve developer experience, streamline operations, and enable rapid, high-quality delivery of new features and services.

If you’re passionate about building reliable platforms, enabling teams to ship with confidence, and bringing intelligent automation into engineering workflows, we’d love to hear from you. Help us scale Disney’s infrastructure with a focus on security, performance, developer experience, and innovation.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve resilient, secure, and scalable AWS infrastructure for software services and data pipelines, while driving platform standards across teams.
• Lead adoption and enhancement of Kubernetes (EKS) with Istio service mesh for traffic management and observability.
• Architect secure network configurations, including VPC design, IAM, peering, and service-to-service security.
• Own and improve CI/CD automation using Jenkins, Spinnaker, and GitHub Actions, ensuring scalable and governed software delivery.
• Advance infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform, enabling reusable module patterns.
• Lead AIOps initiatives including anomaly detection, automated remediation, and intelligent alerting to reduce operational noise.
• Identify and implement automation opportunities using Python, Go, or similar to accelerate delivery.
• Act as a technical SME during high-severity incidents and root cause investigations, collaborating with infrastructure, data, and application teams.
• Establish and advocate for best practices in cloud security, compliance, cost governance, and disaster recovery.
• Guide teams on managing infrastructure across environments with strong observability and minimal manual effort.
• Collaborate with Ads Data and Application teams to co-design infrastructure that meets shared goals.
• Mentor engineers and stakeholders on DevOps, cloud architecture, and platform maturity.
• Collaborate with platform engineering to evolve internal developer tooling, onboarding patterns, and golden paths.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline; or requisite work experience
• 10+ years of experience across Infrastructure, DevOps, Software Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering in large-scale cloud environments.
• Deep expertise with AWS core services (EKS, IAM, VPC, S3, CloudWatch, ALB/NLB).
• Strong experience with Kubernetes (especially Amazon EKS) and Istio in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with Jenkins, Spinnaker, and GitHub Actions in enterprise-scale CI/CD environments.
• Proficiency in one or more automation languages (Python, Go, Java).
• Experience designing and securing infrastructure from CI/CD to runtime, including the network layer.
• Ability to translate business needs into infrastructure blueprints and automation strategies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Masters Degree in Computer Science, MBA, or related field; and/or related certifications
• Experience designing and supporting infrastructure for real-time data pipelines (Spark, Flink, Kafka, Databricks) and orchestration frameworks (Airflow, MWAA), as well as traditional application workloads.
• Background in media, ad tech, or regulated environments (SOX, GDPR, CCPA).
• Exposure to Datadog, Prometheus, or similar observability stacks.
• Familiarity with AIOps platforms or GenAI-based automation solutions for operational use cases.
• Experience leading infrastructure modernization or platform consolidation initiatives.

Compensation and Location

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA and Glendale, CA is $184,300 to $247,100 per year; in Seattle, WA is $193,100 to $258,900 per year; and in San Francisco, CA is $201,900 to $270,700 per year. Base pay may vary by geographic region and other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided, in addition to comprehensive benefits.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The Walt Disney Company and its affiliated companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers. If you require a reasonable accommodation in order to apply, please visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will respond to requests related to accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.