Sr. Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Burbank, California, United States

Salary: $144,100–$193,200 per year in California

Company

Walt Disney Animation Studios develops animated entertainment and production technology within The Walt Disney Company, a diversified entertainment and media enterprise operating in more than 40 countries.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and maintain agents and agentic workflows supporting technologists and production teams.
• Build agent definition frameworks covering orchestration, runtime components, and prompt and context management.
• Develop MCP servers, APIs, and integrations connecting agents to studio data, services, pipelines, Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and proprietary applications.
• Develop skills, memory, and other context artifacts for reliable long-running agents.
• Guide validated use cases from proof of concept and prototyping through MVP and full production.
• Partner with platform, infrastructure, data, tooling, and security teams; create reusable standards, evaluate emerging technologies, and support adoption through documentation and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a comparable field, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of experience in software development, AI/ML engineering, or related disciplines.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as C++, with strong software engineering fundamentals including version control, testing, and code review.
• Hands-on experience with large language models, agents, tool use or function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt and context engineering, or model evaluation through professional, academic, or personal projects.
• Familiarity with agentic frameworks, SDKs, and protocols such as Model Context Protocol, Google ADK, A2A, Anthropic or OpenAI SDKs, and LangGraph or similar tools.
• Daily-driver experience with AI code assistants such as Claude Code, Codex, or GitHub Copilot and agentic coding workflows.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs and backend services, with familiarity with databases and SQL.
• Experience with containerization and CI/CD pipelines such as Docker, Kubernetes, or GitLab CI/CD, plus comfort working in UNIX/Linux environments.
• Ability to break down ambiguous problems, iterate quickly, adapt to changing technology, communicate effectively, and collaborate cross-functionally.

Nice to have

• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, vision-language models, or multimodal approaches.
• Experience with model gateways and MLOps tools such as LiteLLM or AWS Bedrock, including multi-model routing, observability, and AI evaluation.
• Familiarity with animation or VFX production workflows, computer graphics, media systems, or studio production environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work with engineering, production, platform, infrastructure, data, tooling, and security teams.
• People-focused and responsible approach to emerging technology, with human creativity and curiosity at the center.
• Base pay may be supplemented by a bonus and/or long-term incentive units.
• Medical, financial, and other benefits may be provided depending on the level and position.