Sr. Software Engineer - Emerging Technology

At Walt Disney Animation Studios we have a deep commitment to the philosophy that creativity inspires technology, and technology inspires creativity. Engineers in our Production Technology department are charged with developing and implementing new algorithms to solve unique and challenging problems for all of our animated content. We do this working alongside talented people that share a collaborative environment with us, and use the code we develop daily.

The Emerging Technology Sr. Software Engineer will collaborate with engineering and production teams to build supportive tooling and agentic workflows, focusing on templates and frameworks that help teams develop technical solutions efficiently. While partner teams provide the underlying platform, infrastructure, and governance, this role focuses on how agents are defined along with the use of MCPs, skills, and memory systems, connecting to studio data, pipelines, and applications to reliably deliver impactful benefits to production.

At Disney Animation, we employ a responsible and people-focused approach to using new technology. Human creativity and curiosity are immense and unique – and are at the heart of Disney Animation. And we are using this people-focused approach as we think of the possibilities for emerging technology within our Studio. Our studio thrives on a wide variety of technical backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage applicants to apply even if they have experiences not specified below.

Responsibilities

● Design, develop, and maintain agents and agentic workflows that support technologists and production teams across the studio.

● Build the technology around agents by defining and supporting agent definition frameworks, including orchestration, runtime components, and prompt/context management, to make agentic development repeatable and reliable.

● Develop MCP servers, APIs, and integrations (including managing MCP servers for secure tool-use by AI agents) that connect agents to studio data, services, pipelines, and digital content creation tools (e.g., Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and proprietary in-house applications).

● Develop skills, memory and other agent context artifacts for maintaining high reliability in long-running agents.

● Collaborate with workflow and production stakeholders to guide validated use cases through every stage of development, spanning proof of concept, prototyping, MVP, and full production.

● Partner with platform, infrastructure, data, tooling, and security teams to ensure agent development aligns with studio standards, safety guardrails, and LLM security practices. 

● Create documented standards, blueprints, and reusable patterns that help other engineering teams adopt agentic development.

● Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and protocols; run experiments and share findings to help shape the studio's technical direction.

● Support adoption and responsible use through demos, documentation, and knowledge sharing with engineers and artists. 

Key Qualifications

● BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

● 5+ years of experience in software development, AI/ML engineering, and/or related disciplines.

● Proficiency in one or more languages such as C++, with strong software engineering fundamentals (version control, testing, code review).

● Hands-on experience building with large language models, agents, tool use / function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt and context engineering, or model evaluation. Through either professional, academic, or personal projects.

● Familiarity with agentic frameworks, SDKs, and protocols (e.g., Model Context Protocol (MCP), Google ADK and A2A. Anthropic or OpenAI SDKs, LangGraph, or similar). 

● Daily-driver experience with AI code assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot) and agentic coding workflows.

● Experience designing and consuming APIs and backend services; familiarity with databases and query languages such as SQL.

● Experience with containerization and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI/CD).

● Comfort working in UNIX/Linux environments.

● Ability to break down ambiguous problems into manageable steps, iterate quickly, and adapt as the technology landscape shifts.

● Strong verbal and written communication skills and a collaborative, cross-functional working style.

Bonus Qualifications

● Experience with vector databases, embeddings, and semantic search; familiarity with vision-language models (vLMs) and multimodal approaches.

● Experience with model gateways and MLOps tooling (e.g., LiteLLM, AWS Bedrock), including multi-model routing, observability, and evaluation for AI systems. 

● Familiarity with animation or VFX production workflows, computer graphics, and/or media systems.

● Experience within a studio production environment.

PAY TRANSPARENCY

The hiring range for this position in British Columbia, Canada is C$120,700 to C$161,800 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 full range of medical, financial, and/or other variable pay or benefits, may be offered dependent on the level and position offered.

This position is with Walt Disney Animation Studios Vancouver Inc., which is part of a business we call Walt Disney Animation Studios.

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

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