Lead Product Manager, AI Platform

Lead Product Manager, AI Platform

At Disney Experiences Technology, our team creates world‑class immersive digital experiences for the Company’s premier vacation brands including Disney’s Parks & Resorts worldwide, Disney Cruise Line, Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa, and Disney Vacation Club.

We are responsible for the end‑to‑end Guest experience for all technology & digitally led initiatives across Attractions & Entertainment, Food & Beverage, Resorts & Transportation, and Merchandise lines of business, as well as AI-related innovation.

This role sits within the AI Center of Excellence (COE) inside DX Tech & Digital, focused on building and scaling the internal AI Platform that powers next‑generation intelligent solutions across Disney Experiences.

As a Lead Product Manager (AI Platform), you will report into the Senior Manager, AI Platform, and serve as the senior technical IC inside a Product Engineering pod focused on translating internal stakeholder needs into shipped AI capabilities on the platform stack. You will own the path from initial stakeholder conversation through working system — scoping, building, evaluating, and graduating or retiring AI work end‑to‑end — and will set the technical direction for how the team prototypes and ships.

You will operate independently of the standard sprint cycle, work directly with internal stakeholders without a PM intermediary, and influence adjacent engineers and PMs without managing them. This role is an individual contributor; mentorship of adjacent engineers and PMs is expected, but no direct reports.

• Take internal stakeholder asks from initial conversation to shipped AI capability: owning discovery, scoping, design, build, and rollout end‑to‑end, without waiting for requirements to be handed down.
• Build AI‑native workflows on the internal AI Platform stack: prompts, agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and the integrations that make them useful.
• Drive technical direction for the Product Engineering pod within the AI Platform team: setting prototyping standards, evaluation patterns, and shared tooling that the rest of the team builds on.
• Operate independently of the standard sprint cycle; make product and architecture decisions in a low‑structure environment, knowing when to cut scope, when to ship, and when to ask for input.
• Share work‑in‑progress at 70% complete to gather stakeholder feedback and iterate, rather than holding work until it’s polished.
• Instrument prototypes with eval frameworks to know whether a capability is earning its place; graduate, harden, or retire work deliberately based on what the data shows.
• Build prototypes, demos, and mockups that demonstrate AI capability to stakeholders, validate emerging platform patterns, and serve as reference implementations to future work.
• Mentor adjacent engineers and PMs on AI prototyping and outcome‑driven development; serve as the point of escalation for prototype‑stage work across the team.
• Influence cross‑team alignment with platform engineers, AI ops, security and compliance partners, and PMs, driving outcomes through influence rather than authority.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and recommendations to senior stakeholders, connecting platform capability to measurable business outcomes.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent years of work experience.
• 7+ years of combined experience across software engineering and product roles in technical or AI‑platform contexts.
• Production experience with LLM‑powered applications, including advanced prompt engineering, agent frameworks, evaluation pipelines, and retrieval‑augmented generation.
• Hands‑on technical capability sufficient to scope, build, and ship a working prototype end‑to‑end – comfortable in Python and modern AI tooling, able to operate without engineering or PM handoff.
• Demonstrated experience taking ambiguous stakeholder asks and returning working systems, comfortable talking to users directly, without waiting for a product manager to define requirements.
• Demonstrated history of taking…