Senior Software Engineer

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. 

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 looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help shape the future of Ad Technology’s Generative AI platform, with a focus on building reusable capabilities and intelligent agents that streamline and automate critical operational workflows. This is a unique opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI tools to real-world challenges, improve efficiency, reduce manual effort, and empower teams across our ad delivery ecosystem.

You’ll play a dual role:

• Engineering reusable GenAI platform services, such as prompt routing, vector search, auditing, guardrails, and secure gateway abstraction

• Building production-ready agents using frameworks like LangGraph and LangChain to automate workflows across infrastructure, support, CI/CD, and business operations

This role is ideal for engineers excited to work at the intersection of backend systems, AI orchestration, platform architecture, and enterprise automation. You'll be joining a collaborative team at the forefront of GenAI enablement, helping to shape how modern AI tools are applied to real operational challenges in one of the most advanced ad tech environments.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Design and build reusable GenAI platform components, including

• Prompt orchestration layers

• Secure gateway abstraction using tools like LiteLLM, Portkey, or Kong

• Embedding and retrieval infrastructure using vector databases like Pinecone, or FAISS

• Audit, logging, and trace analysis with tools like LangSmith

• Guardrails integration for output validation, safety checks, and policy enforcement

• Develop multi-turn LLM agents and tools using LangGraph and LangChain to automate operational workflows

• Build robust APIs, SDKs, and accelerator components that serve as initializers for internal product teams, bots, and platforms to rapidly integrate and adopt GenAI services

• Standardize approaches to context management, tool calling, fallback handling, and observability across agents

• Ensure platform components meet security, governance, and compliance standards

• Partner with infrastructure, data, security, and product teams to integrate GenAI workflows into existing systems

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; and/or related work experience

• 5+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, with a track record of building scalable APIs

• Hands-on experience integrating with LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, and Anthropic, and building LLM-powered workflows, agents, or AI assistants

• Proficient in Python; familiarity with LangChain, LangGraph, or similar LLM orchestration frameworks

• Familiarity with observability practices for LLM-based systems, including logging, latency tracking, and output monitoring

• Experience with LLM evaluation and testing frameworks to validate prompt behavior and agent reliability across iterations

• Strong understanding of cloud-native design patterns, secure AI API integration, and service scalability

• Working knowledge of vector databases such as Pinecone, FAISS, or Weaviate, along with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques

• Experience building modular, reusable GenAI components that support cross-functional adoption and internal accelerators

• Comfort working with CI/CD pipelines and collaborating with DevOps teams to deploy and monitor GenAI workflows

Preferred Qualifications:

• Masters Degree in a related field; and/or related certification/s

• Experience with LangSmith, PromptLayer, or tracing tools for debugging and evaluation of LLM workflows.

• Knowledge of AI gateway patterns and usage throttling like Kong, LiteLLM, or Portkey.ai

• Familiarity with guardrails, safety evals, prompt injection defense, and model governance frameworks.

• Previous experience building platforms or enablement tooling used across multiple engineering teams.

• Exposure to infrastructure or DevOps automation use cases is a plus.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA is $138,900 to $186,200 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $152,100 - $203,900 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.