Manager, Applied AI - User Experience (UX)

Job Posting Title:

Manager, Applied AI - User Experience (UX)

Req ID:

10155881

Job Description:

This role will be on-site at least 4 days per week for teamwork and collaboration!

Department Description:

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

Team Description:

Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration team embeds directly with our businesses to turn AI possibilities into shipped solutions. We prototype fast, solve real problems, and build the internal capability that makes it stick. If you want to build things that actually change how Disney operates, this is your team. 

What You’ll Do:

We are hiring a Manager, Applied AI – User Experience to join our Team!

This role will be responsible for building a team of AI-native builders who obsess over the human on the other side of the screen: design-minded engineers who treat Claude, Cursor, and whatever comes next as native collaborators; run a squad of 2-4 inside Disney’s Applied AI Acceleration practice, taking ambiguous problems from our business partners and shipping AI-powered products that move the needle.

What matters most is that you speak and think in user problems and AI solutions. This isn’t about building fast for its own sake. It’s about knowing you’re building the right thing for the user. And that the thing you ship looks, feels, and flows like someone cared about the person using it. The person across the table, not the ticket in the backlog.

Design-minded engineers who ship are great. Engineers who obsess over the user are great. What we care about is that you deliver value to the business teams who need it most. The ones inside Disney who have had “we should use AI for this” on a roadmap for two years and don’t know where to start.

You’re insatiably curious, high-collaboration, low-ego. You can’t help yourself. You’re constantly building at the frontier, whether or not anyone’s asked you to. And you lead by doing. This is a player-coach role; you’ll be in stakeholder rooms and in the codebase with your team, prototyping the experience and shipping alongside them, as the senior technical voice on the squad when the engagement needs one, the one who can take a design from concept to a working, usable product.

Responsibilities

• End-to-end delivery of 2-4 concurrent AI engagements with different cadence: some get scoped and shipped in days, others take weeks.

• The opening of every engagement: finding the real problem underneath the stated one, proving feasibility fast, and deciding what’s worth shipping.

• Own the user experience of what the squad ships: the interface, the look and feel, the process flow, and the responsive elements. Pressure-test it with real usability feedback rather than taste alone.

• Lead the squad’s front-end craft: high-fidelity prototypes and proofs-of-concept for web and mobile, plus the design systems, component libraries, and interaction patterns that keep them consistent and scalable.

• Stakeholder relationships across all levels of the organization. You translate between business outcomes and technical tradeoffs without losing nuance in either direction.

• Stand up a squad of 2-4 builders: Applied AI Engineers, a Squad Anchor or partnership with the Principal Applied AI Engineer, occasional Data Engineer or TPM pairing.

• Engage hands-on across the squad: product reviews, design and usability reviews, code reviews, architecture reviews, pairing on hard problems, prototyping interfaces, picking up Cursor and working through the stuck parts of an agent loop, retrieval pipeline, or eval harness.

• Run technical review of proposed design and product changes for feasibility and integration with existing architectures, systems, and design standards.

• Pattern extraction. Every engagement yields at least one reusable component, design-system primitive, playbook, or template that the practice can deploy on the next one.

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• 8+ years of experience as a design engineering lead, founding PM, consulting engagement lead, solutions engineering lead, engineering manager, tech lead, or equivalent.

• Experience with end-to-end delivery of AI-powered products against real business problems. LLMs, agents, embeddings, classical ML.

• You design and code the interface, not just the backend: prototypes, UI, and responsive front-end. You can take a design from concept to a working, usable product, and you’ve shipped the user-facing layer yourself, including high-fidelity prototypes for web and mobile.

• Front-end depth: hands-on proficiency with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and a modern framework such as React, plus responsive and adaptive UI layouts and UI development best practices.

• User-centered design judgment: usability, look and feel, process flow, and choice of responsive elements, informed by evaluation and testing, not taste alone.

• Working depth, not just fluency, with the modern AI application stack, in production: prompt design, RAG, tool-calling agents, eval harnesses, and the operational realities of shipping non-deterministic systems at scale.

• Architectural judgment for AI systems. You’ve made the production calls on latency budgets, cost tradeoffs, fallback strategies, and where to put humans in the loop, and you’ve reviewed proposed changes for feasibility and integration with existing systems.

• Data literacy. Enough to unblock yourself when an engagement stalls on a data question instead of waiting for the Data Engineer.

• Experience leading people: direct reports, tech leads, design or product owners, and/or engagement teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building AI products without a dedicated engineering team backing you. Solo-builder-who-ships, startup founder, design engineer, consulting EM, solutions engineer.

• Experience creating and maintaining scalable design systems and component libraries in tools such as Figma, including interactive prototypes and shared components.

• Experience designing or engineering for emerging platforms such as VR, AR, mixed reality, or interactive character-based experiences.

• A design-engineering background: you’ve lived on the seam between design and engineering and are fluent on both sides.

• Prior experience with enterprise-scale data and legacy systems. The work is rarely greenfield.

• Eval-first mindset. Experience with golden sets, trace analysis, LLM-as-judge, or production eval pipelines.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant experience.

The hiring range for this position in Glendale and Burbank, CA is $171,600 - $230,100 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.

Job Posting Segment:

DO NOT USE - Enterprise Technology and Data

Job Posting Primary Business:

DO NOT USE - Core Systems & Platforms

Primary Job Posting Category:

User Experience Engineer

Employment Type:

Full time

Primary City, State, Region, Postal Code:

Glendale, CA, USA

Alternate City, State, Region, Postal Code:

USA - CA - Studio Lot - Old Animation - Bldg 11

Date Posted:

2026-08-05