Manager – Applied AI

The Walt Disney Company

Manager leading Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration squads. Shipping AI-powered products, translating business needs into solutions, and building reusable enterprise capabilities.

Posted 8/21/2026full-timeBurbank • California, Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorLead💰 $171,600 - $241,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in delivering AI-powered products end-to-end, leveraging a modern AI application stack and leading cross-functional teams. Capable of translating business needs into technical solutions while fostering stakeholder relationships and driving team performance.

Highest-signal resume keywords

AI-Powered Product DeliveryLeadership ExperienceModern AI Application StackData LiteracyTeam Building

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

AI Product DevelopmentLLMsClassical MLSQLAPIsPrompt DesignRAGTool-Calling AgentsEval HarnessesData Transformation

Soft Skills

Stakeholder Relationship ManagementProblem SolvingCommunicationTeam CollaborationPlayer-Coach Leadership

Tools & Technologies

Cursor

Industry Keywords

Applied AIEngagement TeamsEnterprise-Scale DataLegacy SystemsGolden DatasetsTrace Analysis

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

SQL

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build a team of AI-native builders and run a squad of 2–4 team members within Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration practice
Take ambiguous business problems from partners and ship AI-powered products
Deliver 2–4 concurrent AI engagements with varying cadences, from days to weeks
Stand up squads of 2–4 builders, including Applied AI Engineers, a Squad Anchor or Principal Applied AI Engineer, and occasional Data Engineer or TPM support
Review pull requests, pair on difficult problems, and work through blocked implementation areas using Cursor
Identify the underlying problem, rapidly prove feasibility, and decide what is worth shipping at the start of each engagement
Build stakeholder relationships across all organizational levels
Translate between business outcomes and technical tradeoffs
Extract reusable components, playbooks, or templates from each engagement for future deployments
Lead by doing in a player-coach role, contributing directly in the codebase alongside the team

Requirements

What you’ll need

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 delivering AI-powered products end-to-end, including LLMs, agents, embeddings, and classical ML
Working fluency with the modern AI application stack in production: prompt design, RAG, tool-calling agents, and eval harnesses
Data literacy: SQL, APIs, and basic transformations
Experience leading people, including direct reports, tech leads, and/or engagement teams
Experience building AI products without a dedicated engineering team backing you (preferred)
Prior experience with enterprise-scale data and legacy systems (preferred)
Experience with golden datasets, trace analysis, and LLM-as-judge (preferred)
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

Benefits

Comp & perks

Bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package
Medical benefits
Financial benefits
Other benefits dependent on the level and position offered