Senior Manager or Manager, AI Engineering

Senior Manager or Manager, AI 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 – AI Engineering

Ad Platform builds Disney’s industry-leading advertising technology, supporting sports, news, and entertainment content across all major media platforms. Our systems handle high-scale, high-throughput, revenue-critical workloads.

We are looking for Managers and Sr Managers in Software Engineering to lead The Walt Disney Company’s Ad Platform engineering teams in Bengaluru. These roles offer ownership, technical depth, and global visibility, working on AI-driven advertising platforms that operate at massive enterprise scale.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position, ideal for leaders who enjoy staying close to architecture, design, and code—while managing engineers and at times managers; and building strong engineering organizations. You’ll draw from deep and broad technical expertise to mentor engineers, complete hands-on technical work, and provide leadership on complex technical issues. You will play a key role in scaling platforms, modernizing cloud and data systems, and growing the next generation of engineering leadership in India. You’ll be a strong advocate of responsible usage of artificial intelligence to improve software quality and developer productivity.

Role Summary

We are hiring Engineering Managers to lead AI engineering across software products, shared capabilities, and AI systems operations within Ad Platforms.

This role oversees teams building AI-enabled applications and backend services, developing reusable AI components and orchestration frameworks, and ensuring AI workloads operate reliably at enterprise scale. You will be responsible for advancing AI adoption while establishing strong standards for reliability, evaluation, model lifecycle governance, performance optimization, and cost management.

You will define clear ownership across product development, shared capabilities, and operational excellence, ensuring AI systems move from experimentation to production with measurable quality, stability, and financial discipline.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role that blends people management, architectural influence, and delivery accountability. Success will be measured by scalable AI adoption, production resilience, evaluation rigor, and sustainable cost efficiency across Ad Platforms.

What You’ll Do

Build and scale AI engineering teams

Hire, lead, and develop high-performing engineers across AI software products, AI shared capabilities, and AI operations. Mentor senior and staff engineers, strengthen technical leadership, and drive disciplined execution across AI initiatives.

Deliver AI-powered software products

Lead development of AI-enabled web applications and backend services that orchestrate LLMs and multimodal foundation models. Define scalable architectures using LangGraph and Python across AWS, GCP, Azure, and other model-serving environments.

Develop reusable AI shared capabilities

Create common AI components, orchestration patterns, model integration services, and developer tooling that accelerate adoption across teams. Ensure shared capabilities are secure, observable, and built for broad reuse.

Establish AI operational excellence

Define and enforce standards for reliability, evaluation, monitoring, and cost management across AI workloads. Partner with infrastructure and security teams to ensure AI systems are production-ready, compliant, and resilient.

Drive technical leadership and alignment

Act as a hands-on technical leader shaping architecture and engineering best practices. Collaborate with product, data, infrastructure, and governance stakeholders to deliver AI solutions that are measurable, responsible, and aligned with business outcomes.

What makes this role unique

• Global impact from India: You’ll be part of Disney India innovation hub and work with talented builders creating impact on customers across geography. You will lead AI platforms that power global products like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC—used by millions of people worldwide.

• Strong ownership: Disney India is a core engineering hub. Ad Platform leaders have complete ownership and autonomy of architecture, delivery, and people development.

• Leadership development: Build and mentor senior AI engineers and managers, shaping the future of Disney’s engineering leadership in India.

• Work-life harmony: Disney India values work-life harmony. We provide flexibility as part of work culture, including flexible workdays and hours.

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience leading high-performing software engineering teams, including experience managing managers and globally distributed squads.

• Experience delivering AI-enabled software products or features in production environments.

• Experience building or operating AI-enabled systems that integrate LLMs or multimodal foundation models.

• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across product development, shared capabilities, and operational domains.

• Strong understanding of foundation model behavior, including LLM constraints, latency characteristics, rate limits, and cost-performance tradeoffs.

• Experience designing scalable distributed systems that integrate external APIs and model-serving services across AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar environments.

• Experience developing AI-enabled services using modern orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, or similar, primarily in Python.

• Proven ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-paced environments with evolving technical and business priorities.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate technical strategy and AI system posture across engineering, product, data, and operations leaders.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading AI product engineering, AI shared capability teams, or AI reliability and operational engineering initiatives at scale.

• Experience building reusable AI components, orchestration layers, or shared developer tooling adopted across multiple teams.

• Experience driving AI adoption within complex enterprise environments while balancing innovation, governance, and operational discipline.

• Experience presenting AI product roadmap, performance posture, and investment strategy to senior leadership.

• Experience managing globally distributed engineering teams across time zones.

• Passion for building innovative, resilient, and developer-friendly AI solutions aligned with Disney’s mission.

• Experience defining AI technical strategy, including model selection and capability prioritization across product and platform domains.

• Experience leading development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems using embeddings and vector search.

• Experience managing AI cost governance at scale, including token optimization and model utilization strategies.

• Familiarity with secure AI integration practices, including prompt injection mitigation and output validation.

Experience with:

• Designing and operating AI-enabled applications in production, including user-facing services and backend systems that orchestrate LLMs and multimodal foundation models.

• Structured agent and workflow-based architectures using frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, or similar orchestration systems.

• Implementing model evaluation, release gating, or certification workflows to ensure measurable quality and performance.

• Defining and managing service-level objectives, incident response processes, and reliability standards for distributed AI workloads.

• Establishing observability and operational telemetry for AI systems, including monitoring latency, throughput, cost, and model behavior.

• Building scalable, secure API-driven architectures with strong engineering fundamentals in object-oriented design and dependency management.

• Driving modernization initiatives and scaling infrastructure to support mission-critical, revenue-impacting systems.

• Driving AI experimentation frameworks and A/B evaluation strategies to improve measurable model performance.

• Applying data governance, access control, encryption, and compliance best practices across multi-cloud AI environments.

• Driving automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and continuous delivery practices across both software and AI-enabled services.