Director, Applied AI Acceleration (SWE)

Role Overview

The Walt Disney Company is building a new Applied AI team within Enterprise Technology to accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise. This team will operate as a high-impact engagement practice—embedding directly with business teams to diagnose operational challenges, identify high-value AI opportunities, and deliver production-grade solutions that create measurable business outcomes.

The Director, Applied AI will build this team from the ground up and lead it as both strategic architect and hands-on technical leader. You will set the vision, design the engagement model, recruit and develop world-class talent, and personally drive early engagements that establish the team’s reputation for excellence. This is a rare opportunity to create something new at the intersection of AI innovation and one of the world’s most complex and iconic businesses.

What You’ll Do

Build and Scale the Team

• Recruit, hire, and develop a team of ~20 applied AI practitioners across the U.S. and India, blending software engineers, AI/ML specialists, and product-minded technologists.
• Establish a team culture rooted in craft, velocity, and user empathy—where every member brings a product mindset to technical challenges.
• Coach and mentor team members at all levels; create clear growth paths that retain top talent in a competitive market.
• Foster a learning organization through internal hackathons, knowledge sharing, and continuous upskilling on emerging AI capabilities.

Design the Engagement Model

• Architect the team’s strategic engagement framework—a structured, repeatable methodology for how Applied AI partners with business teams across TWDC.
• Lead discovery-first engagements: embed with business stakeholders to deeply understand their workflows, pain points, and operational context before proposing solutions.
• Apply industry best practices from applied AI disciplines (lean/kaizen process analysis, design thinking, rapid prototyping) to frame engagements that move from discovery to deployed solution in weeks, not months.
• Establish a tiered engagement model: rapid wins (days to weeks), focused sprints (4–8 weeks), and strategic partnerships (quarter-long transformations) to match effort to opportunity size.

Deliver Applied AI Solutions

• Lead from the front: personally engage in early projects to set the bar for quality, speed, and stakeholder experience.
• Build AI agents, automation workflows, and intelligent tools that solve real problems—from autonomous procurement negotiation to knowledge worker acceleration.
• Bring a “start with the papercuts” philosophy: identify low-hanging fruit that demonstrates AI efficacy quickly, building trust and momentum while the team develops capability for larger transformations.
• Ensure solutions are production-grade, maintainable, and designed for the humans who will use them—not just technically impressive.

Drive Strategy and Executive Alignment

• Set strategic vision and technical direction for how Applied AI creates value across TWDC’s diverse business portfolio.
• Build and maintain superb relationships across business units, translating non-technical pain points into compelling AI roadmaps.
• Communicate with executive presence: present to senior leadership with clarity, credibility, and a bias toward outcomes over technology.
• Develop a portfolio view of AI opportunities across the enterprise; prioritize ruthlessly based on business impact, feasibility, and strategic alignment.

Who You Are

You are a builder. You’ve created teams from scratch and know the difference between hiring a roster and building a culture. You are equally comfortable whiteboarding system architecture, coaching a junior engineer through a hard problem, and presenting a quarterly roadmap to a C-suite audience. You’ve shipped products, not just prototypes—and you know how to navigate the stakeholder complexity of a global enterprise to get things across the finish line.

Specifically, you bring:

• Deep applied AI expertise: hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, workflow automation, and modern AI development tooling (Cursor, Claude, Copilot, etc.). You don’t just manage AI teams—you understand the work and can open a laptop and build alongside your team.
• A product mindset: you instinctively start with user needs, not technical capabilities. You’ve shipped AI-powered products to real users and understand the full lifecycle from concept through launch.
• Process intuition: you can walk into a complex business operation, see where it breaks down, and map the path from manual process to intelligent automation. You think in systems, not features.
• Exceptional communication and relationship skills: you build trust quickly, translate fluently between technical and business language, and navigate complex stakeholder environments—legal, procurement, security, executive leadership—with empathy and precision.
• Leadership at scale: experience building and managing distributed teams (including offshore), with a coaching-first philosophy that develops people into leaders. You’ve hired well, and the people you’ve developed have gone on to do great things.
• Enterprise fluency: you understand how large organizations actually work—the governance, the vendor dynamics, the cross-functional alignment required to ship at scale. Deep familiarity with TWDC’s business units, organizational dynamics, and strategic priorities is strongly preferred.
• Bias toward action: you’d rather ship an 80% solution today and iterate than spend three months on a perfect plan. You bring energy, not process theater.

Qualifications

• Required 15+ years in software engineering, AI/ML, product development, or applied technology roles, with progressive leadership experience.
• Demonstrated experience delivering AI/ML-powered products or solutions in enterprise production environments.
• Strong technical foundation across the AI stack: can evaluate architecture decisions, assess model fitness, guide build-vs-buy trade-offs, and contribute to technical direction.
• Track record of delivering outsized results—building high-performing teams that ship fast and punch above their weight.
• Experience navigating complex enterprise stakeholder environments—legal, procurement, security, and executive leadership—to drive initiatives from concept to completion.
• Experience designing engagement or delivery frameworks for internal consulting, center of excellence, or professional services models.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.

Preferred

• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related quantitative discipline.
• Experience with AI agent frameworks, autonomous workflow design, and modern rapid-development methodologies.
• Track record of AI patent activity or applied research that has translated into shipped products.
• Background in management consulting, internal consulting, or AI Center of Excellence models.
• Familiarity with enterprise platforms (Coupa, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP) and their AI integration opportunities.
• Experience leading AI vendor evaluation, negotiation, and enterprise-scale platform rollouts.
• Existing relationships across TWDC business units and technology leadership.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA is $239,700 to $321,400 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.