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.

Manager, Applied AI – The Walt Disney Company (Hybrid)

Lead 2–4-person squads that deliver production AI products for Disney’s entertainment and technology businesses. This player-coach role combines LLM application development, stakeholder discovery, and rapid solution delivery.

Description

  • Develop an AI-native builder team within Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration practice
  • Manage 2–4-person squads delivering AI products for Disney business partners
  • Oversee 2–4 concurrent AI engagements with delivery timelines ranging from days to weeks
  • Form squads with Applied AI Engineers, a Squad Anchor or Principal Applied AI Engineer partner, and occasional Data Engineer or TPM support
  • Review pull requests, collaborate on complex technical challenges, and contribute directly to the codebase with tools such as Cursor
  • Clarify the core business problem, validate feasibility quickly, and decide which solutions should reach production
  • Cultivate stakeholder relationships across the organization
  • Connect business objectives with technical tradeoffs
  • Turn lessons from each engagement into reusable components, playbooks, or templates
  • Work on-site at least four days per week to support collaboration and teamwork
  • Code and ship alongside the team as a player-coach

Requirements

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

Benefits

  • Bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be available
  • Medical benefits
  • Financial benefits
  • Additional benefits may vary by level and position
  • Primarily on-site work with occasional remote work

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