Hybrid Lead Software Engineer – AI Core Engineering

at The Walt Disney Company

• Job title: Lead Software Engineer – AI Core Engineering
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $141,900 - $208,400 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Python
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Glendale, United States

About the role

• Lead Software Engineer driving AI adoption across Ad Technology at Disney. Responsible for scaling AI capabilities and leading technical initiatives with cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Define reference designs and best practices for reusable AI agents, services, and webapps.
• Provide technical guidance and code/design reviews for senior engineers.
• Lead the design and development of agents, SDKs, and accelerators that support multiple teams.
• Deliver APIs and frameworks that simplify integration with AI services and enterprise systems.
• Develop high-quality APIs and SDKs that simplify adoption of AI capabilities by other engineering teams.
• Establish standards for guardrails, evaluation, and observability of AI-driven workflows.
• Partner with security and governance teams to ensure compliance and safe adoption.
• Mentor engineers, share knowledge, and raise the overall technical bar.
• Work with product, infra, and security leaders to accelerate AI adoption across Disney Ad Tech.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred), or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 1+ years in technical leadership roles.
• Strong proficiency in Python and backend frameworks; experience building scalable APIs and SDKs.
• Hands-on with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude) and orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph).
• Experience integrating with enterprise AI services such as AWS Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry.
• Strong knowledge of AI safety, governance, and evaluation practices.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and drive cross-team adoption of shared solutions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience conducting code reviews and enforcing best practices for maintainability, security, and performance.
• Proven ability to mentor and coach engineers, providing feedback, guidance, and technical growth opportunities.
• Experience with system design and architecture discussions, including trade-off analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions (infra, data, security, product) to align on shared solutions.

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