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# Principal Product Software Engineer

- **Company:** The Walt Disney Company
- **Location:** Bristol, CT, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $191,300.0 - $256,500.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Java (Programming Language), Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Amazon S3, Architectural Patterns, Information Systems, Databases, Cursor, Distributed Systems, Github, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Software Product Management, Software Engineering, Cloud Platform System, Claude Code, Spring-boot, Caching, Backend, Gitlab, Kotlin, Amazon Relational Database Service, AI Platforms, Information Technology, Production Code, Data Management, Teamcity, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), OpenSearch
- **Published:** October 27, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.jobmonkeyjobs.com/career/28134329/Principal-Product-Software-Engineer-Connecticut-Bristol-1396

## About the Role

* A minimum of 10 years relevant industry experience
 * Mastery of backend platform development technologies and software architectural patterns
 * Extensive experience with Cloud-based architecture
 * Extensive experience with Java, Kotlin or other system level languages and using enterprise-grade frameworks such as Spring Boot.
 * Extensive expertise with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate engineering velocity and demonstrated experience optimizing AI usage for cost and performance through prompt optimization, caching, and smart model routing.
 * Proven ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar codebases and rebuild or modernize systems with AI at significantly higher productivity than a typical engineer, while maintaining quality.
 * Experience with multiple database technologies such as Mysql, Postgresql, RDS, Casandra, Mongo, etc.
 * Experience with task Automation (GitLab Pipelines, GitHub Actions, TeamCity)
 * Strong communication skills and attention to detail
 * Ability to research, learn and evangelize new technologies, * Extensive experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), including services such as S3, Lambda, SNS/SQS, RDS, Kinesis, KMS, OpenSearch, etc
 * Experience working on highly scalable, real-time content or data platforms serving millions of consumers.
 * Experience integrating with enterprise AI services such as AWS Bedrock, including model invocation, routing, and governance integration.

Education:

 * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

## Description

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., As a Principal Software Engineer in the Sports Backend Engineering team, you will be part of a diverse and talented organization building and maintaining complex sports platform services and applications for ESPN. You'll join a team creating the world's leading sports products, working across codebases, teams, and subject matters to accelerate software engineering velocity with AI, shipping production code in a fast-paced, AI-native engineering environment. Beyond your daily responsibilities, you'll have opportunities to contribute innovative ideas for our products and help drive them to fruition., * Help accelerate velocity across teams by helping design and build AI-native tooling, agents, and workflows that help software engineers and other disciplines move faster from idea to production.

 * Partner with engineering teams across the org to rapidly prototype and ship AI-driven solutions, balancing speed with performance, scalability, caching, resiliency, and flexibility for expanding product requirements.
 * Design, Develop and Document architectural platform frameworks for shared solutions across teams. Lead code and architectural reviews and competitive backend industry research
 * Provide platform production support for a complex distributed system that delivers historical and live sports data to Web, Mobile and Living Room devices.

 * Acquire a deep understanding of our business processes, dependent systems, and teams, and develop professional relationships with key stakeholders, including business users, product managers, designers, and other Principal Engineers both inside and outside of our organization, to inform technical strategy and drive alignment.