Lead AI-Driven Systems Engineer (Streaming)

The Walt Disney Company; New York (NY); On-site; USD 163,000 - 219,000; Full time

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Lead Software Engineer in New York/Los Angeles to design AI-powered, distributed systems for Disney’s streaming platform. You will build autonomous agents, ML models, and real-time pipelines that transform telemetry into automated detection and proactive insights.

You will collaborate with product and platform teams to embed intelligence in production systems, deliver end-to-end features, and lead code reviews in a fast-paced AI-native environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience with AI-powered apps and scalable APIs.
• Strong experience with Spark/PySpark and Python.
• Proven ability to design production-grade, scalable systems.
• Expertise with AI/ML including foundation models and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement distributed systems using real-time telemetry and AI-driven anomaly detection.
• Define patterns and scaling strategies for agentic AI systems with large foundation models.
• Develop data pipelines transforming telemetry into actionable insights and detections.
• Create scalable APIs delivering predictive signals and insights to teams and tools.
• Embed intelligence into incident response, release validation, and subscriber experience workflows.
• Drive observability, reliability, and developer productivity with applied AI.
• Set engineering standards, perform code reviews, and mentor junior engineers.

Skills

Backend development

Spark / PySpark

Python

AI/ML engineering

Foundation models

PyTorch / TensorFlow

Git & CI/CD

Docker / Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

LangChain

LangGraph

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Lead Software Engineer in New York/Los Angeles to design AI-powered, distributed systems for Disney’s streaming platform. You will build autonomous agents, ML models, and real-time pipelines that transform telemetry into automated detection and proactive insights.

You will collaborate with product and platform teams to embed intelligence in production systems, deliver end-to-end features, and lead code reviews in a fast-paced AI-native environment.