Principal Product Manager

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

Job Summary:

The Data Product team is seeking a Principal, Data Product Management to own the strategy and long-term vision for a critical suite of data collection solutions across a global portfolio of digital products, defining the future of data collection as an enterprise capability. The collection layer sets the quality and reliability of every downstream analytics output, every experiment, and every model that depends on it across Disney Entertainment & ESPN. Decisions here carry portfolio-wide consequences, and making them well takes dedicated Principal-level ownership.

You'll own the product roadmap spanning the solutions we run with longstanding strategic partners and the capabilities we build and scale ourselves, delivering world-class data collection across web, mobile, and connected devices. You'll serve as the product counterpart to the Data Engineering and Product Engineering teams who build and maintain the platform, and lead cross-organizational initiatives. Equally important, you'll define what data collection at Disney needs to become, not just how to evolve what exists today. If you've operated at the domain level in ambiguous, precedent-free environments, driven architectural decisions at enterprise scale, and built the organizational confidence to make long-term platform bets, we'd like to hear from you.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Own the long-term strategy and vision for data collection, across partner-run solutions and the platforms we build ourselves.
• Continuously evaluate the market and make principled build-vs-buy calls as the technology shifts.
• Be the product counterpart to Data Engineering on roadmap, sequencing, and tradeoffs, staying hands-on.
• Lead and influence across the org without formal authority, resolving high-stakes conflicts and informing durable, long-term decisions.
• Support data quality and the operating model at the source, keeping collected data reliable and auditable.
• Identify the highest-leverage problems before they're defined and deliver where no established approach exists.
• Translate requirements into scalable platform capabilities: schemas, standards, and contracts, increasingly AI-assisted.
• Mentor PMs across Data Product and partner teams, raising the bar for sophistication and AI-assisted ways of working.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years in Data Platform Product Management, Data Instrumentation, or a closely related technical product discipline.
• Domain- or portfolio-level outcome ownership at enterprise scale; feature-level data-platform PM experience is not sufficient for this role.
• Platform or infrastructure product strategy driven in close partnership with Engineering, hands-on in architecture and schema design.
• Hands-on production experience with data collection platforms (tag management, web data-layer, CDP-style), and the judgment to evaluate and choose between them.
• Experience defining enterprise data contracts, schema registries, and governance standards in multi-producer, multi-consumer environments.
• A track record of building new structures or capabilities in high-ambiguity, precedent-free environments, not just enduring them.
• Proven ability to influence roadmap and investment decisions without direct authority across multiple organizations.
• Experience mentoring multiple PMs across teams, with demonstrated impact on their judgment or trajectory.
• Fluency with AI tools in your own work, and a track record of raising that bar across the PMs you influence.
• Familiarity with the modern cloud data stack and how collection quality and schema choices affect downstream analytics, ML, and BI.
• Proficiency in SQL and/or Python for data validation, schema verification, and troubleshooting.
• Executive-level communicator, equally clear with engineers and senior leaders, who resolves disagreements through reasoning, not rank.

Preferred Qualifications

• Data observability experience: monitoring pipelines for quality, freshness, schema drift, and anomalies.
• Experience evaluating or leading enterprise technology transitions: build-vs-buy, platform migration, and the change management involved.
• Familiarity with downstream ML and AI data requirements: what makes collected data usable as training signal or feature input.
• Strong grasp of data governance, privacy, and consent (GDPR, CCPA) and how regulation shapes collection architecture.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Required Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

#Disneytech

The hiring range for this position in New York City, NY is $197,400 - $264,700 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $206,400 - $276,700 per year, and in Santa Monica, CA and Bristol, CT is $188,400 - $252,600 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.