Director, Applied AI Acceleration (SWE)

The Walt Disney Company•Seattle, WA

1d•$239,700 - $321,400•Onsite

About The Position

The Walt Disney Company is establishing a new Applied AI team within Enterprise Technology to accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise. This team will function as a high-impact engagement practice, embedding with business teams to diagnose operational challenges, identify high-value AI opportunities, and deliver production-grade solutions that achieve measurable business outcomes. The Director, Applied AI will be responsible for building this team from the ground up and leading it as both a strategic architect and a hands-on technical leader. This role involves setting the vision, designing the engagement model, recruiting and developing world-class talent, and personally driving early engagements to establish the team’s reputation for excellence. It offers a unique opportunity to innovate at the intersection of AI and one of the world’s most complex and iconic businesses.

Requirements

You are a builder. You’ve created teams from scratch and know the difference between hiring a roster and building a culture.
You are equally comfortable whiteboarding system architecture, coaching a junior engineer through a hard problem, and presenting a quarterly roadmap to a C-suite audience.
You’ve shipped products, not just prototypes—and you know how to navigate the stakeholder complexity of a global enterprise to get things across the finish line.
Deep applied AI expertise: hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, workflow automation, and modern AI development tooling (Cursor, Claude, Copilot, etc.). You don’t just manage AI teams—you understand the work and can open a laptop and build alongside your team.
A product mindset: you instinctively start with user needs, not technical capabilities. You’ve shipped AI-powered products to real users and understand the full lifecycle from concept through launch.
Process intuition: you can walk into a complex business operation, see where it breaks down, and map the path from manual process to intelligent automation. You think in systems, not features.
Exceptional communication and relationship skills: you build trust quickly, translate fluently between technical and business language, and navigate complex stakeholder environments—legal, procurement, security, executive leadership—with empathy and precision.
Leadership at scale: experience building and managing distributed teams (including offshore), with a coaching-first philosophy that develops people into leaders. You’ve hired well, and the people you’ve developed have gone on to do great things.
Enterprise fluency: you understand how large organizations actually work—the governance, the vendor dynamics, the cross-functional alignment required to ship at scale.
Bias toward action: you’d rather ship an 80% solution today and iterate than spend three months on a perfect plan. You bring energy, not process theater.
15+ years in software engineering, AI/ML, product development, or applied technology roles, with progressive leadership experience.
Demonstrated experience delivering AI/ML-powered products or solutions in enterprise production environments.
Strong technical foundation across the AI stack: can evaluate architecture decisions, assess model fitness, guide build-vs-buy trade-offs, and contribute to technical direction.
Track record of delivering outsized results—building high-performing teams that ship fast and punch above their weight.
Experience navigating complex enterprise stakeholder environments—legal, procurement, security, and executive leadership—to drive initiatives from concept to completion.
Experience designing engagement or delivery frameworks for internal consulting, center of excellence, or professional services models.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related quantitative discipline.
Experience with AI agent frameworks, autonomous workflow design, and modern rapid-development methodologies.
Track record of AI patent activity or applied research that has translated into shipped products.
Background in management consulting, internal consulting, or AI Center of Excellence models.
Familiarity with enterprise platforms (Coupa, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP) and their AI integration opportunities.
Experience leading AI vendor evaluation, negotiation, and enterprise-scale platform rollouts.
Existing relationships across TWDC business units and technology leadership.

Responsibilities

Recruit, hire, and develop a team of ~20 applied AI practitioners across the U.S. and India, blending software engineers, AI/ML specialists, and product-minded technologists.
Establish a team culture rooted in craft, velocity, and user empathy—where every member brings a product mindset to technical challenges.
Coach and mentor team members at all levels; create clear growth paths that retain top talent in a competitive market.
Foster a learning organization through internal hackathons, knowledge sharing, and continuous upskilling on emerging AI capabilities.
Architect the team’s strategic engagement framework—a structured, repeatable methodology for how Applied AI partners with business teams across TWDC.
Lead discovery-first engagements: embed with business stakeholders to deeply understand their workflows, pain points, and operational context before proposing solutions.
Apply industry best practices from applied AI disciplines (lean/kaizen process analysis, design thinking, rapid prototyping) to frame engagements that move from discovery to deployed solution in weeks, not months.
Establish a tiered engagement model: rapid wins (days to weeks), focused sprints (4–8 weeks), and strategic partnerships (quarter-long transformations) to match effort to opportunity size.
Lead from the front: personally engage in early projects to set the bar for quality, speed, and stakeholder experience.
Build AI agents, automation workflows, and intelligent tools that solve real problems—from autonomous procurement negotiation to knowledge worker acceleration.
Bring a “start with the papercuts” philosophy: identify low-hanging fruit that demonstrates AI efficacy quickly, building trust and momentum while the team develops capability for larger transformations.
Ensure solutions are production-grade, maintainable, and designed for the humans who will use them—not just technically impressive.
Set strategic vision and technical direction for how Applied AI creates value across TWDC’s diverse business portfolio.
Build and maintain superb relationships across business units, translating non-technical pain points into compelling AI roadmaps.
Communicate with executive presence: present to senior leadership with clarity, credibility, and a bias toward outcomes over technology.
Develop a portfolio view of AI opportunities across the enterprise; prioritize ruthlessly based on business impact, feasibility, and strategic alignment.