Applied AI Engineering Manager — Ship AI Solutions

1008 Disney Worldwide Services, Inc.; California (MO); On-site; USD 172,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Long-term incentive units

Bonus potential

Job summary

Disney is hiring a Manager, Applied AI in Burbank, CA (on-site 4 days/week) to build and lead a small squad of AI engineers. You will convert business problems into AI-powered products, working closely with partners and product teams.

The role requires 8+ years of experience and leadership exposure, strong AI delivery skills, and comfort with LLMs, tool-calling, and data transformations. Seattle relocation may be considered for the right candidate.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant experience.
• 2+ years in a leadership-adjacent role: Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, or equivalent.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products end-to-end.
• Experience with LLMs, agents, embeddings, classical ML.
• Working fluency with the modern AI application stack in production.
• Data literacy: SQL, APIs, basic transformations.
• Experience leading people - direct reports or engagement teams.

Responsibilities

• End-to-end delivery of 2-4 AI engagements with varying cadences.
• Stand up a squad of 2-4 builders.
• Review PRs and unblock hard problems.
• Identify real problems, prove feasibility, decide what to ship.
• Maintain stakeholder relationships and translate business outcomes to technical tradeoffs.
• Extract patterns and deliver reusable components, playbooks, or templates.

Skills

Leadership

AI product delivery

LLMs & agents

Production AI stack

Data literacy

SQL & APIs

People management

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

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Job description

Disney is hiring a Manager, Applied AI in Burbank, CA (on-site 4 days/week) to build and lead a small squad of AI engineers. You will convert business problems into AI-powered products, working closely with partners and product teams.

The role requires 8+ years of experience and leadership exposure, strong AI delivery skills, and comfort with LLMs, tool-calling, and data transformations. Seattle relocation may be considered for the right candidate.