Senior Software Engineer - AI Core Engineering at DISNEY
Skip to main content Go to Menu Home Our Work Our Locations Our Culture Students Search Jobs What would you like to do? Keyword Where would you like to work? Country/Region Select a country/region Argentina Australia Canada France Germany Hong Kong India Singapore South Korea United Kingdom United States State/Province Select a state/province British Columbia Buenos Aires F.D. California Connecticut DC England Florida Île-de-France Region Islands District Lower Saxony Maharashtra New South Wales New York North Carolina Seoul Texas Washington City Select a city Anaheim Bristol Buenos Aires Burbank Celebration Charlotte Emeryville Glendale Lake Buena Vista Lantau Island London Los Angeles Marne-la-Vallée Moore Park Morrisville Mumbai New York Nicasio Orlando Papenburg San Antonio San Francisco Santa Monica Seattle Singapore The Woodlands Vancouver Washington West Hollywood Search Jobs Reset
Senior Software Engineer - AI Core Engineering Apply Now Apply Later Job ID: 10140845 Location Glendale, California, United States / San Francisco, California, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States Business Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Date posted Jan. 22, 2026 Job Summary: 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.
Hiring Range 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.
About Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology: At Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology, we're blending imagination and innovation to reimagine the ways people experience and engage with the world's most beloved stories and products. Our work is wide-ranging and deeply sophisticated. We create amazing experiences, transform the future of media, and build products and platforms that enable the connection between people everywhere and the stories and sports they love.
Disney's ability to marry world-class technology with one-of-a-kind creativity makes us unique. It is at the heart of our past, present, and future. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers.
About The Walt Disney Company: The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney's stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.
This position is with Disney Streaming Technology LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.
Disney Streaming Technology LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.
Apply Now Apply Later Current Employees Apply via My Disney Career Explore Location Share Facebook LinkedIn Email Related Jobs Lead Software Engineer - Java Glendale, California, United States Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Research Seattle, Washington, United States / Santa Monica, California, United States Sr Product Mgr Glendale, California, United States Disability Accommodation For Employment Applications The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, email Candidate.Accommodations@Disney.com with your request. This email address is not for general employment inquiries or correspondence. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.
Having technical issues? View