Principal Software Engineer chez Disney

Job Posting Title:

Req ID:

Job Description:

At Disney Experiences Technology, our team creates world-class immersive digital experiences for the Company’s premier vacation brands including Disney’s Parks & Resorts worldwide, Disney Cruise Line, Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa, and Disney Vacation Club. The Disney Experiences Technology team is responsible for the end-to-end digital and physical Guest experience for all technology & digital-led initiatives across the Attractions & Entertainment, Food & Beverage, Resorts & Transportation, and Merchandise lines of business as well as other initiatives including the MyDisneyExperience app and Hey, Disney!

This role sits on the team building an AI platform that supports the entire DX organization within Technology for Disney Experiences. It works closely with partners from across the company. 

The Principal Software Engineer will report to the Senior Manager, Software Engineering.

About The Role & Team:

The DXT AI Technology Platform team is responsible for building an AI enablement platform for the DX segment that provides streamlined AI & Generative AI capabilities for the segment to build solutions around and on top of.  The Principal Software Architect defines a business‑aligned, future‑focused AI platform technology roadmap and leads its execution through the full lifecycle-from architecture and funding design to design and delivery.

What You'll Do:

• Architect and mature a cloud‑native AI platform that balances security, scalability, reliability, and cost‑effectiveness.
• Provide leadership to cross‑functional teams through platform feature implementation and delivery of AI solutions.
• Champion business-relevant emerging AI research and technologies; run proof‑of‑concepts and drive platform adoption.
• Establish engineering standards, governance, and observability frameworks (monitoring, alerting, incident response).
• Mentor senior engineers and foster a culture of continuous learning, inclusive growth, and technical excellence.
• Communicate technical vision to executives, product owners, and other AI platform stakeholders.
• Estimate and plan large AI projects, defining scope, resource allocation, timelines, and cost estimates.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Minimum 10 years of hands‑on software development and systems architecture.
• Proven track record architecting large‑scale AI/ML platform initiatives and leading technical teams.
• Demonstrated ability to discover, evaluate, and champion new technologies.
• Primary expertise in Python; proficiency in at least one of NodeJS, Go, or Java is acceptable.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes ecosystem (common resource types, operators, CRDs).
• Experience designing and implementing 12‑factor cloud‑native applications.
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent).
• CI/CD and MLOps tooling (GitHub Actions, Harness, Jenkins, Kubeflow, MLflow, etc.).
• GPU/TPU cluster orchestration, model parallelism, and inference queueing.
• Experience with ZeRO/DeepSpeed, request batching, and other acceleration patterns.
• Experience with modern observability technologies (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Splunk).
• Design of monitoring, alerting, and incident‑response processes.
• TLS best practices, secret management (Vault, KMS, etc.), secure coding standards.
• Modern relational databases (MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc.).
• Vector‑search databases (Milvus, Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Vertex AI Matching Engine).
• In‑depth understanding of transformer architectures.
• Fine‑tuning and efficiency methods: QLoRA, LoRA, PEFT, RoPE, quantization, weight pruning.
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG): chunking, retrieval caching, context summarization.
• Agent and tool‑calling patterns (MCP, map‑reduce, planning, summarization).
• Solution architecture using ArchiMate, TOGAF, or equivalent enterprise‑level modeling.
• Strong grasp of software engineering design principles.

Preferred Skills & Qualifications:

• Publications, patents, or conference presentations in AI/ML.
• Experience with large‑scale data platforms such as Snowflake.
• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, Google Professional Cloud Architect, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator.
• Proven cost‑optimization strategies for GPU workloads.

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

Preferred Education:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

Job Posting Segment:

Job Posting Primary Business:

Primary Job Posting Category:

Employment Type:

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Date Posted: