Manager - Applied AI

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

Claude

Cursor

Job description

Manager - Applied AI

Department Description: At Disney, we're storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt's passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world-a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Unifying each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences - and we're constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

Team Description

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.

What You'll Do

We are hiring a Manager, Applied AI to join our Team! This role will be on-site at least 4 days per week for teamwork and collaboration! This role will be responsible for building a team of AI-native builders: engineers who treat Claude, Cursor, and whatever comes next as native collaborators; run a squad of 2-4 team members inside Disney's Applied AI Acceleration practice, taking ambiguous problems from our business partners and shipping AI-powered products that move the needle. What matters most is that you speak and think in user problems and AI solutions. This isn't about building fast for its own sake. It's about knowing you're building the right thing for the user. The person across the table, not the ticket in the backlog. Engineers who know product are great. Product ninjas who know how to build are great. What we care about is that you deliver value to the business teams who need it most. The ones inside Disney who have had we should use AI for this on a roadmap for two years and don't know where to start. You're insatiably curious, high-collaboration. You're constantly building at the frontier, whether or not anyone's asked you to. And you lead by doing. This is a player-coach role; you'll be in the codebase with your team, shipping alongside them.

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.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

Pay & Benefits

Salary: The hiring range for this position in Burbank, CA is $171,600 - $230,100 per year and in Seattle, WA is $179,700 - $241,000. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.

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.

Employment Type: Full time

Location: Burbank, CA (on-site at least 4 days per week). Alternate location: Seattle, WA 925 4th Ave