Job Requirements

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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 technologicalfoundation 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:

1. Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building theproducts and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

2. 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.

3. 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 are hiring a Sr Product Development Engineer to lead AI Performance, Cost & Operational Intelligence within Foundations Engineering – AI Production Engineering.

This role owns the visibility, optimization, and operational analytics for AI-powered systemsacross Ad Platforms. You will design and implement token usage telemetry, cost governance systems, performance profiling frameworks, and operational analytics tooling to ensure AI workloads scale efficiently and predictably.

You will partner closely with AI Core Engineering, Runtime & Reliability, Infrastructure, Architecture, and Finance stakeholders to provide measurable insight into AI workload behavior, cost posture, and performance trends.

This role combines backend systems engineering with analytics-driven operational intelligence and AI workload optimization.

Responsibilities:

AI Performance & Cost Architecture

• Design and implement token usage telemetry and analytics pipelines.

• Define cost tracking standards for AI-dependent services.

• Build dashboards for latency, throughput, cost, and usage monitoring.

• Partner with Infrastructure to support AI capacity modeling and forecasting.

• Define performance baselines and optimization targets for AI workloads.

Operational Intelligence & Automation

• Build anomaly detection systems for AI service degradation.

• Design automated log summarization and incident triage workflows.

• Identify systemic performance or cost inefficiencies and drive remediation strategies.

• Implement feedback loops between runtime telemetry and engineering teams.

Governance & Reporting

• Provide engineering-driven reporting on AI cost posture and performance trends.

• Support executive readiness reviews with measurable workload analytics.

• Collaborate with AI Core and Evaluation teams to align performance metrics with model quality metrics.

Engineering Execution & Leadership

• Contribute directly to backend systems supporting telemetry and analytics.

• Mentor engineers on performance optimization and distributed systems observability.

• Drive continuous improvement of AI operational maturity standards.

Basic Qualifications:

• 8+ years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience.

• Strong proficiency in Python or similar backend language.

• Experience designing telemetry, analytics, or performance monitoring systems.

• Experience operating distributed services in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Experience profiling and optimizing service performance.

• Experience integrating with external or rate-limited APIs.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working with AI-powered or model-dependent systems.

• Familiarity with token usage modeling and cost forecasting. •

Experience building operational dashboards or analytics pipelines.

• Exposure to anomaly detection or operational automation systems.

Experience with:

• Distributed backend systems and performance optimization.

• Telemetry pipelines, metrics systems, and observability tooling.

• Rate limiting, concurrency management, and throughput analysis.

• Log aggregation and incident investigation workflows.

• Cloud-native architectures in AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Cost modeling or resource utilization analytics systems.

• CI/CD pipelines and automated monitoring integration.

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred), or equivalent experience.

This position is with Disney (India) Private Limited, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

To learn more about Disney's guidelines on the use of AI for candidates, click here.

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