Senior Software Engineer - AI Core Engineering

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally. 
• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

Job Summary:

We’re hiring a Senior AI Engineer to build the AI core capabilities and tooling that accelerate teams across Ad Technology. You will create shared agents, initializers, registries, and reusable services and web applications that make it fast, safe, and cost-effective for engineering squads to adopt AI.
Your work will emphasize common design principles, guardrails, governance, observability, and evaluation, so teams can deliver high-quality AI solutions quickly—without reinventing the basics.
This role blends backend engineering, LLM orchestration, and developer enablement. You’ll design APIs, SDKs, reusable agents, and web-based solutions that standardize adoption, define patterns for multi-turn interactions, and provide evaluation/traceability so teams can confidently scale AI across Disney Ad Tech.
 

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

AI Core Design & Principles

• Define and implement shared design patterns for agents and services, including context management, retrieval, safety, and evaluation.
• Establish reusable blueprints that standardize how AI solutions are built across Ad Tech.

Reusable Agents & Tools

• Build production-ready agents, initializers, and libraries for common use cases (summarization, troubleshooting, semantic extraction).
• Develop high-quality APIs and SDKs that simplify adoption of AI capabilities by other engineering teams.

Shared Services & Web Applications

• Deliver core services for retrieval, memory, and orchestration, integrated with enterprise and consumer facing systems.
• Create internal webapps and dashboards that expose AI capabilities, evaluation metrics, and adoption accelerators.

Safety, Governance & Observability

• Embed guardrails, compliance checks, and prompt safety into all shared components.
• Implement model evaluation and observability frameworks for quality, reliability, and cost monitoring at scale.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend or applied AI/ML engineering with a track record of building production-grade systems.
• Proficiency in Python (libraries, testing, packaging) and building scalable APIs or SDKs.
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude) and frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph.
• Experience integrating with enterprise AI services such as AWS Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry, including model invocation, routing, and governance integration.
• Experience developing reusable agents, libraries, or internal tooling adopted by multiple teams.
• Knowledge of guardrails and evaluation techniques for LLMs, including prompt safety, output validation, and quality regression testing.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills; able to work across infra, data, security, and product teams.
• Bedrock or AI Foundry

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI enablement tooling (registries, agent initializers, internal frameworks) for enterprise use.
• Familiarity with observability for AI systems: tracing, latency and cost dashboards, drift detection.
• Knowledge of AI gateway patterns (e.g., routing, usage throttling, model fallback, quota enforcement).
• Exposure to multi-agent orchestration, simulation frameworks, or synthetic data for testing/eval.
• Understanding of enterprise governance: security, compliance, audit, and policy enforcement in AI systems.
• Previous experience in a developer enablement role (platform engineering, frameworks, SDKs) where reusable components accelerated adoption across large organizations.

Required Education  

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred), or equivalent experience.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, California is $141,900 to 190,300 per year, Seattle, WA is $148,700 to $199,400, and San Francisco, CA is $155,400 to $208,400 per year. 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. 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.