Hybrid Lead Software Engineer – AI Operations and Tooling

at The Walt Disney Company

• Job title: Lead Software Engineer – AI Operations and Tooling
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $141,900 - $190,300 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Grafana, Java, Prometheus, Python, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Glendale, United States

About the role

• Lead Engineer guiding AI Operations and Tooling for Disney's media technology. Focus on safe and efficient AI applications across major cloud platforms while mentoring teams.

Responsibilities

• Define frameworks for AI-specific operations: hallucination/quality testing, evaluation pipelines, and continuous validation.
• Establish reference patterns for scaling LLM services, prompt orchestration, and multi-agent workloads.
• Build automation for safe rollout, monitoring, and incident response.
• Implement end-to-end observability: latency, drift, failure modes, hallucination rates, and GPU/compute utilization.
• Drive cost optimization and efficiency across AI cloud usage (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Define SLOs, dashboards, and runbooks for AI/LLM production systems.
• Embed compliance, safety checks, and prompt-injection defenses into operational frameworks.
• Mentor engineers in DevOps, infra, and AI operations.
• Drive adoption of best practices for AI reliability, test automation, and incident management.
• Collaborate across AI Core, Data Foundations, Security, and Product teams to ensure operational safety and scale.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred), or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure, with at least 2 years in a lead role.
• Expert in at least one foundational language (Python, Java, or Go) with production-grade system experience.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP a plus) and modern orchestration platforms.
• Proven experience with observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana) and incident response automation.
• Familiarity with AI/LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry) and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph).
• Strong knowledge of operational AI testing (A/B evaluation, regression, red-teaming) and guardrail enforcement.
• Demonstrated ability to optimize cloud/GPU usage and manage costs at scale.
• Excellent communication skills and proven ability to lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and influence cross-functional teams.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Flexible work hours
• Paid time off
• Remote work options
• Bonuses