Principal Product Manager, Data Platforms

Job ID 10158790 Location San Francisco, California, United States / Santa Monica, California, United States / Glendale, California, United States Business Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Date posted Aug. 28, 2026

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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 & Data 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.

About the Role

We are hiring a Principal Product Manager to own the Data Growth Platform end to end: the platform and its architecture, the quarter-over-quarter improvement of its core capabilities, the expansion of the platform into One Disney use cases across every segment, and the marketing outcomes it delivers.

The seven workstreams that make up the platform, data pipelines and sharing, audience analytics and modeling, identity and household resolution, governance automation, audience creation and management, centralized and federated activation, and measurement and optimization, currently run across Corporate Brand, Ad Sales, Disney Experiences, Streaming, enterprise data science, and multiple engineering squads. You are the single product owner who makes them behave as one platform.

This is a builder-operator role with unusual breadth. You will set the vision and own business outcomes, but you will also be in the data model, the identity match rates, the governance workflow, and the campaign results. Success is measured not by what ships, but by what the business wins because it shipped.

Responsibilities

1. The Platform, End to End

Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap across data, identity, intelligence, and activation — and sequence it so each milestone delivers standalone business value rather than infrastructure alone.
Own the full product surface: the cross-segment data model and data sharing architecture, identity and household resolution, the governance layer and data contracts, audience creation, centralized and federated activation, and campaign measurement.
Be the accountable owner across a matrix: engineering squads, Corporate Brand, Ad Sales, Disney Experiences, enterprise data science, Privacy, Legal, and Data Governance. You unblock; you do not escalate.
Hold the line on privacy and governance as a first principle, not a gate at the end. Consent enforcement, tagging and masking, GDPR and CCPA policy, and lineage are product requirements you own alongside engineering and Legal.
Make build-vs-buy-vs-partner calls explicit across the vendor landscape, cloud data warehousing, ML and analytics tooling, reverse-ETL activation, marketing clouds, identity and enrichment providers, and data cataloging, and own the evaluation and funding case for third-party enrichment.
Guard the reuse principle. The platform succeeds by extending what Disney already has. Resist rebuilds; productize common integrations and patterns so the next use case is cheaper than the last.

2. Improving the Platform Quarter Over Quarter

Set objective measures, not deadlines. Establish a quarterly operating rhythm with a small number of measurable platform goals, a published scorecard, and an honest retrospective on what moved and what did not.
Own and improve the core platform metrics: audience development cycle time, audience analytics project throughput, activation volume, identity and household match coverage, data freshness, activation success rate, share of governance requests auto-approved, and time-to-first-value for a new team onboarding.
Close the known gaps. Profile-level data across the streaming services remains incomplete, and household resolution depends on privacy clearance for the deterministic householding solution, with third-party household IDs as a partial fallback. Own the plan, the sequencing, and the fallback.
Drive self-service. Push conversational and AI-assisted audience analysis to the point where a marketer can size and build an audience without filing a ticket, and mature it from prototype to production quality.
Fund and defend platform debt paydown so the cost of each incremental use case falls every quarter.

3. Unlocking New Use Cases

Make the platform the default growth layer across Entertainment and Streaming, ESPN, Disney Experiences, Consumer Products, Studios, and Ad Sales, not a tool serving one org.
Land the foundational use cases and turn each into a reusable pattern: incremental audience activation, lapsed subscriber re-engagement, content and creative personalization by franchise affinity, enterprise synergy and suppression, cross-business engagement modeling, and guest next-best-action.
Get the first real activations live and instrumented so the platform generates its own performance data, the single most important unlock in front of it today.
Partner deeply across business units. Understand each segment's goals, data, constraints, and incentives, and design solutions that serve more than one of them at a time.
Navigate the governance frontier with Privacy, Legal, and Data Governance from the start: data contracts, anonymization strategy for onboarding business-unit datasets, permission and consent consolidation, and the household identity rulings that gate the roadmap.

4. Driving Marketing Wins

Tie platform capability directly to business outcomes: user-level ARPU, cross-enterprise lifetime value per household, churn reduction, incremental conversion into new lines of business, and marketing spend efficiency.
Partner with marketing teams on real campaigns: tentpoles, cruise and park conversion, streaming win-back, and make sure the platform is the reason they performed better.
Build measurement and experimentation into the platform so wins are provable and repeatable. Land a platform-native campaign ID stamped upstream in every vendor, then unique reach, frequency, overlap, and incremental lift.
Change the narrative. The platform currently reads to leadership as a technology enabler, which understates its role in One Disney. Build the portfolio of documented, attributable wins that reframes it as a growth engine, and use it to secure continued investment.
Treat marketers as your primary customer. Know their workflow better than they do, and translate their feedback into the roadmap continuously.

Basic Qualifications

10+ years in product management, with significant time on data, platform, or marketing technology products serving internal customers.
Bachelor's degree in a related field.
Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of a platform, vision through operations, with quantified outcomes you can point to.
Deep fluency in the marketing data stack: customer data platforms, identity resolution, audience segmentation and activation, campaign delivery, and measurement and attribution.
Strong technical depth. You can hold your own on data modeling, warehouse architecture, API contracts, and system trade-offs, and engineers respect your judgment.
Working command of privacy and consent as product constraints, GDPR, CCPA, consent enforcement, data masking and tagging, and the approval workflows that surround marketing data.
A track record of influencing without authority across large, matrixed organizations with independent P&Ls and competing priorities.
Rigorous, metrics-first operating style: you define the measure before you build, and you report against it honestly.
Exceptional written and verbal communication. You can brief an engineer and an executive on the same problem in the same week and be equally clear.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in media, entertainment, streaming, consumer subscription, or large-scale consumer retail and hospitality.
Hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses, lakehouse analytics platforms, and warehouse-native activation or reverse-ETL tooling.
Experience delivering identity resolution or householding at scale, including third-party enrichment and match-rate trade-offs.
Experience applying machine learning or LLM-based intelligence to audience analysis, affinity modeling, personalization, or next-best-action.
Experience building shared platforms across multiple business units or brands, including the governance and data-contract work that requires.
Experience rebuilding credibility for an initiative in a space where prior attempts have created stakeholder fatigue.

#TECHATDISNEY

The hiring range for this position in San Francisco, CA is $206,400 - $276,700 per year and in Santa Monica/Glendale, CA 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.

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About Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology:

At Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology, we’re blending imagination and innovation to reimagine the ways people experience and engage with the world’s most beloved stories and products. Our work is wide-ranging and deeply sophisticated. We create amazing experiences, transform the future of media, and build products and platforms that enable the connection between people everywhere and the stories and sports they love.

Disney’s ability to marry world-class technology with one-of-a-kind creativity makes us unique. It is at the heart of our past, present, and future. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

This position is with Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

To learn more about Disney's policies on the use of AI for candidates, click here.

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Explore this Location San Francisco, CA

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