Lead Software Engineer - AI Operations and Tooling

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.

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.

We are hiring a Lead Engineer to establish and guide our AI Operations and Tooling practice, enabling the safe, reliable, and cost‑efficient operation of AI applications across AWS, Azure, and GCP. This role is focused on enabling AI‑specific operations, such as hallucination testing, A/B evaluation, guardrail enforcement, and cost optimization, by leveraging, extending, and building around existing tools and platforms to accelerate operational stability and performance.

As a hands‑on technical lead, you will mentor engineers, design operational enablement frameworks, and partner closely with AI engineering, product teams. The goal is not to own every tool, but to make AI systems more observable, testable, and resilient by enabling the right capabilities and automation around them. This role will deliver measurable business outcomes by preventing runaway spend, improving reliability, and driving efficiency in AI/cloud usage.

• 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.

• Partner with security and governance teams to enforce enterprise‑grade auditability and policy enforcement.

• Mentor engineers in Dev Ops, 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.

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

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, Dev Ops, or…