Lead Full Stack Software Engineer - AI Assisted Engineering Practices
About The Position
This role is not remote and requires the candidate to be in the area or willing to relocate. The Disney Experiences (DX) team creates immersive digital experiences for premier vacation brands. This specific role is within the Disney Signature Experience organization, supporting high-visibility, guest-facing digital platforms for businesses like Storyliving by Disney, Adventures by Disney, and National Geographic Expeditions. The Lead Software Engineer will spearhead the development and implementation of custom and commercial software projects, focusing on enhancing both cast and guest experiences. A key aspect of this role is championing the adoption of AI-assisted development tools and process automation throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to improve delivery speed, code quality, and operational efficiency. This position combines hands-on software development with technical leadership, involving designing, building, reviewing code, setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and guiding platform strategy. The role emphasizes modern front-end engineering (UI architecture, performance, accessibility, component-driven development) while maintaining full-stack responsibilities for back-end systems. Collaboration with Product, UX, Content, and Business stakeholders is crucial to ensure the web platform and front-end ecosystem can reliably support high-traffic, revenue-generating digital experiences.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical decision-making, influence architecture across teams, and align engineering solutions with business outcomes
- An advocate for a diverse and inclusive culture that encourages innovation and ensures every team member feels a sense of belonging
- Must have demonstrated success using AI coding assistants (agentic IDEs / AI pair programming) to improve delivery speed and quality
- Must have experience implementing AI-enabled automation across SDLC (testing, code review, documentation, CI/CD) with measurable outcomes
- Strong “trust-but-verify” discipline: validate, secure, refactor, and govern AI-generated output to meet maintainability standards
- Ability to establish team guardrails and educate others on responsible AI usage (risks, over-reliance, licensing/security considerations)
- Strong expertise in modern front-end development using JavaScript and TypeScript
- Must have hands-on experience with Node.js, React and Angular in large-scale applications
- Must have solid full-stack experience with Java, Spring, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, and microservices
- Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Splunk, AppDynamics, etc.)
- Strong understanding of object-oriented design and software architecture principles
- Experience working in agile development environments
Nice To Haves
- 10+ years of experience building and supporting enterprise-scale, customer-facing platforms
- Experience with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), including AEM as a Cloud Service
- Experience with headless or hybrid AEM architectures
- Experience using AI assisted development tools in large engineering teams
- Understanding of responsible AI principles in enterprise or consumer facing environments
- Experience with cloud-based technologies like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure
- Experience with Confluence and Jira to document requirements, user stories and technical designs.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical strategy, roadmap, and operational health of the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform and the guest-facing front-end ecosystem built on it.
- Set front-end architecture direction for guest-facing web experiences (rendering strategy, component architecture, data/state patterns) and ensure consistency across products.
- Lead platform upgrades, security posture, performance optimization, reliability, and scalability initiatives across both the platform and UI layer.
- Establish and evolve engineering standards and best practices for front-end development (patterns, guardrails, quality gates, CI/CD expectations).
- Build and govern reusable capabilities: components/templates/workflows/content models and shared UI component libraries/design system adoption.
- Write, review, and optimize production-quality code using JavaScript and TypeScript; provide hands-on technical leadership for React and Angular implementations.
- Champion web fundamentals using measurable standards and tooling: performance, accessibility (WCAG), SEO, and responsive design.
- Partner with Product, UX, Design, and Content teams to translate designs into scalable, maintainable solutions and enable AI-assisted content workflows (e.g., tagging, summarization, optimization) with brand governance and quality controls.
- Introduce AI-enhanced experience capabilities where valuable (e.g., intelligent search, recommendations, conversational interfaces, personalization) with appropriate quality and risk controls.
- Design, implement, and review APIs, microservices, and backend integrations supporting business and guest experiences.
- Define integration strategies with internal systems and third-party services, ensuring secure and reliable service contracts.
- Contribute hands-on across the stack as needed to unblock teams, accelerate delivery, and resolve complex technical challenges.
- Collaborate with architects on cloud-native and AI solution patterns, ensuring operability and maintainability.
- Ensure end-to-end alignment between front-end, services, and infrastructure (performance, reliability, observability readiness).
- Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices (agentic IDEs, code assistants, AI pair programming) to improve throughput and quality, with clear team guardrails and measurable outcomes.
- Set standards for “trust-but-verify” usage of AI-generated code: validation, security review, refactoring expectations, and maintainability requirements (including preventing over-reliance on automation).
- Expand SDLC automation using AI where it improves outcomes (test generation, documentation generation, code review acceleration, pipeline improvements), while preserving engineering rigor.
- Actively participate in development while leading code reviews to ensure quality, security, and maintainability.
- Identify, prioritize, and remediate technical debt through hands-on contribution and backlog planning.
- Translate business requirements into clear technical designs, stories, and implementation plans.
- Guide estimation, planning, and delivery of complex initiatives.
- Ensure CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and observability are built into all solutions.
- Review and approve solution designs and technical documentation.
- Ensure you remain up to date with emerging technologies so you can make informed recommendations.
- Mentor and coach engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions.
- Provide technical leadership to both onshore and offshore development teams.
- Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing engineering culture.
- Promote effective use of AI-assisted developer tools to improve code quality, velocity, and documentation.
- Lead by example through strong engineering practices, ownership, and accountability.
Benefits
- 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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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Associate degree
