Manager - Applied AI

The Walt Disney Company • Burbank, CA

1d • $171,600 - $241,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.
Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration team embeds directly with our businesses to turn AI possibilities into shipped solutions. We prototype fast, solve real problems, and build the internal capability that makes it stick. If you want to build things that actually change how Disney operates, this is your team.

Requirements

• Minimum 8+ years of relevant experience
• Minimum 2+ years’ experience in a leadership-adjacent role: Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, Consulting Engagement Lead, Solutions Engineering lead, or equivalent
• Experience with delivery of AI-powered products end-to-end. LLMs, agents, embeddings, classical ML
• Working fluency with the modern AI application stack - in production: prompt design, RAG, tool-calling agents, eval harnesses
• Data literacy. SQL, APIs, basic transformations. Enough to unblock yourself when an engagement stalls on a data question instead of waiting for the Data Engineer
• Experience leading people - Direct reports, tech leads and/or engagement teams

Nice To Haves

• Experience building AI products without a dedicated engineering team backing you (ex. Startup Founder, Solutions Engineer, “Solo-PM-who-ships” or any other environments where the gap between idea and production was yours to close
• Prior experience with enterprise-scale data and legacy systems
• Experience with golden datasets, trace analysis, LLM-as-judge

Responsibilities

• End-to-end delivery of 2–4 concurrent AI engagements with different Cadence - some get scoped and shipped in days; others take weeks.
• Stand up a squad of 2–4 builders - Applied AI Engineers, a Squad Anchor or partnership with the Principal Applied AI Engineer, occasional Data Engineer or TPM pairing.
• Review PRs in codebase, pairing on hard problems, picking up Cursor and working through the stuck parts.
• The opening of every engagement: finding the real problem underneath the stated one, proving feasibility fast, and deciding what's worth shipping.
• Stakeholder relationships across all levels of the organization - You translate between business outcomes and technical tradeoffs without losing nuance in either direction.
• Pattern extraction. Every engagement yields at least one reusable component, playbook, or template that the practice can deploy on the next one.

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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager