The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is a global entertainment business built around storytelling, characters, and guest experiences. Its operations span theme parks and resorts, media networks, film studios, and interactive media, with products and experiences reaching audiences across platforms and devices worldwide. Founded in 1923, Disney brings together a large international workforce across entertainment, hospitality, travel, and food and beverage, while maintaining a focus on privacy, transparency, and compliance in its handling of consumer data.

Applied AI Manager, Disney (Burbank Hybrid)

Lead Applied AI squads that deliver AI-powered products for Disney’s entertainment and business operations. This player-coach role combines product discovery, hands-on coding, delivery leadership, and translation of technical decisions for stakeholders.

Description

  • Build and lead a team of AI-native builders within Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration practice, managing squads of 2–4 members
  • Turn ambiguous business challenges into shipped AI-powered products
  • Manage 2–4 concurrent AI engagements with timelines ranging from days to weeks
  • Form squads of 2–4 builders, including Applied AI Engineers and partner roles
  • Review pull requests, pair on complex problems, and unblock implementation work with Cursor
  • Clarify the core problem, validate feasibility quickly, and decide what merits shipping in each engagement
  • Develop relationships with stakeholders across the organization
  • Connect business outcomes with technical tradeoffs
  • Convert engagement learnings into reusable components, playbooks, and templates
  • Lead as a player-coach by contributing directly to the codebase and shipping alongside the team

Requirements

  • At least 8 years of relevant professional experience
  • At least 2 years in a leadership-adjacent position such as Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, Consulting Engagement Lead, Solutions Engineering Lead, or an equivalent role
  • End-to-end experience delivering AI-powered products using LLMs, agents, embeddings, and classical machine learning
  • Working knowledge of modern production AI application patterns, including prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, tool-calling agents, and evaluation harnesses
  • Data fluency with SQL, APIs, and basic data transformations
  • Experience leading people, including direct reports, technical leads, and/or engagement teams
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or a comparable field, and/or equivalent work experience
  • Preferred: experience building AI products without a dedicated engineering team
  • Preferred: experience working with enterprise-scale data and legacy systems
  • Preferred: experience with golden datasets, trace analysis, and LLM-as-judge evaluation

Benefits

  • The compensation package may include a bonus and/or long-term incentive units
  • Medical, financial, and/or other benefits

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