Senior Manager, AI & Machine Learning Engineering

About the role

The Senior Manager, AI & Machine Learning will lead the development of Disney Financial Insights (D-Fi), a new platform reimagining financial data interaction within Disney. This role will shape the technical direction, architecture, and engineering practices for the AI/ML and data layers underpinning D-Fi.

Responsibilities

• Own technical direction end-to-end, setting architecture and technical strategy for the AI/ML and data layers.
• Translate challenging business needs into a scoped, buildable technical roadmap, representing engineering trade-offs credibly to partners and leaders.
• Guide the AI/LLM roadmap, ensuring it builds and maintains trust in AI-generated financial answers.
• Enforce governance by design, ensuring role-based access control (RBAC) is enforced at the data model level.
• Set the bar for engineering quality and delivery, establishing practices for code review, testing, model evaluation, and release management.
• Guide build vs. integrate decisions, assessing when custom capability should be built versus integrated with existing systems.
• Promote adoption broadly by partnering with business finance transformation leads to drive adoption across the enterprise.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software and/or ML engineering leadership experience, with a strong track record of owning technical direction and architecture.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and shipping production LLM/AI applications.
• Working knowledge of LLM orchestration frameworks and vector databases/retrieval stores.
• Strong data modeling background, including semantic/governed data layers.
• Ability to read, write, and review Python code.
• Familiarity with MLOps practices, including model monitoring, retraining pipeline design, containerization, and CI/CD for ML systems.
• Experience working across distributed, cross-timezone engineering teams.
• Comfort operating as the primary technical voice in front of senior business stakeholders.

Skills

• Leadership in software and/or machine learning engineering.
• Production experience with large-scale language models and AI applications.
• Knowledge of modern web and full-stack technologies.
• Experience with ERP/EPM platforms like SAP, Oracle EPM, or Cognos.
• Experience working alongside or evaluating third-party engineering work.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; advanced degree a plus.
• Exposure to finance and ERP/EPM platforms.
• Experience building internal tools for finance organizations.

Benefits

Base pay range varies by location: $197,600 - $264,900 in Orlando, FL; $207,400 - $278,100 in Burbank, CA; $217,300 - $291,500 in Seattle, WA. Additional benefits include medical, financial, and other perks, contingent upon level and position.