Manager - Applied AI

The Walt Disney Company • Burbank, CA

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Disney's Applied AI Acceleration team embeds directly with businesses to turn AI possibilities into shipped solutions. They prototype fast, solve real problems, and build internal capability that makes it stick. This role is for someone who wants to build things that actually change how Disney operates. The Manager, Applied AI will be responsible for building a team of AI-native builders, engineers who treat AI tools as native collaborators. They will run a squad of 2-4 team members within Disney's Applied AI Acceleration practice, taking ambiguous problems from business partners and shipping AI-powered products that make a significant impact. The focus is on understanding user problems and delivering AI solutions, ensuring that the right thing is built for the user. This is a player-coach role, requiring hands-on involvement in the codebase alongside the 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.
• Experience with 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