Director, Applied AI Acceleration (SWE)

Job Posting Title:

Director, Applied AI Acceleration (SWE)

Req ID:

10148438

Job Description:

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