Director, Decision Science Technology

Department Description:

Do you love creating new capabilities by combining your expertise for infrastructure, data, and user experience?  Do you value curiosity, nurturing technical talent, and collaborating to create new business value via innovation?

The Disney Decision Science and Integration (DDSI) team leverages advanced technologies, genAI, analytics, and scientific approaches such as optimization, machine learning, simulation and statistical modeling to build innovative software as a service (SaaS) that shape business decisions across The Walt Disney Company. We support client areas including Disney Entertainment (ABC, The Walt Disney Studios, Disney+, Hulu, ESPN), Disney Experiences (Theme Parks, Cruise Line, Consumer Products, DVC), Corporate Finance, and others, with strategic applications that enable science-driven decision-making and drive business value.

Team Description:

As a Director, Decision Science Technology, you are a versatile engineering leader responsible for building the strategic SaaS applications that deliver DDSI’s science to the business. You will lead a multi-disciplinary team that builds AI-powered products driven by our sophisticated ensembled models, featuring embedded AI, conversational interfaces, and agentic capabilities. You are equally adept at guiding teams focused on scalable data platforms as you are those building sophisticated software applications. Without refined, high-quality data input, algorithms are not useful.  This pivotal role is for a leader passionate about building AI-powered teams that build AI-powered products, owning the end-to-end technology stack from data ingestion to user interface.

To be successful, collaboration with partnering DDSI executives, Global Information Security, Enterprise Technology & Data, segment-specific technology leadership, project managers, client leaders, and technical subject matter experts in a matrixed environment is necessary.  This leader will champion a relentless pursuit toward our own operational excellence, as well as innovation via data-driven business capabilities. 

What You’ll Do:

• Team Vision: Develop and keep relevant a vision for team in a fast-paced, complex and evolving arena.  Foster a high-performing team of technologists and drive a culture of excellence, innovation, and deep collaboration with the science organization, the AI/ML engineering organization, and all partner teams.
• AI-Powered Delivery of AI/ML/Science Products: Own the technology delivery for a portfolio of decision science applications driven by a range of science algorithms. Deliver across the entire development lifecycle, from technical design to deployment, for intelligent applications featuring quantitative AI/ML, agentic workflows and conversational AI.
• Strategic Leadership: Provide ambidextrous technology & data oversight.  Manage a high-performing team in a matrixed environment.  Lead, mentor, and grow an evolving & blended team of software engineers, data engineers, solution architects and platform specialists. Cultivate a unified, agile culture that excels at tackling both complex data challenges and sophisticated application development.  Define and evolve the technology skill mix, career paths, and hiring strategy required to support DDSI’s long-term rapid SaaS speed-to-market vision.
• Full-Stack Architectural Vision: Oversee the technical, data, and system architectures for analytic platforms and solutions.  Provide strategic leadership on the long-term technical vision, including data modeling, microservices architecture, API design, and the advanced tooling required to enable intelligent, interactive applications.
• AI-Powered Productivity: Foster a culture of innovation by leading the adoption of AI tools within the development process (e.g., code assistants, automated testing) to enhance team efficiency, speed of code development, test creation and execution, and improved documentation.
• Design Patterns Definition: Develop roadmaps for reusable capabilities, tools, and agents to harmonize with the portfolio milestones & deliverables while simultaneously raising the bar on standard expectations for deployed solutions, including automated metrics and validation, user-algorithm interactions, and standard features for robust, reliable and secure solution design.
• Operational Excellence: Ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of all production applications. Champion the development of standard operating procedures, quality assurance, and automated monitoring to maintain a healthy and sustainable technology portfolio. Define success metrics and OKRs, establishing clear baselines and targets, and continuously tracking outcomes to inform prioritization and optimize results.
• Technical Debt & Modernization: Proactively identify and remediate technical debt within the existing products. You will balance the "velocity of new features" with the "stability of the core," ensuring that our internal SaaS products remain modern, patchable, and secure.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate closely with peers across organizations to ensure successful product delivery. Partner closely across functional areas to lead directly and via collaboration in a matrixed environment, with emphasis on strong communication, interpersonal collaboration and change management skills
• Change Management: Connect business partners, clients and team with processes improvements and the adoption of the latest business, science and technology standards and best practices
• Stewardship: Ensure all platforms and services are designed with security, privacy, and compliance principles embedded by default. Drive cost‑aware platform design and responsible scaling of storage and compute workloads, balancing innovation velocity with sustainable cloud economics.
• Communication Agility & Influence: Operate effectively at all levels of the organization, translating complex technical concepts into business value for clients and executives, and providing clear strategic direction for your technical teams. Demonstrated interpersonal skills, with ability collaborate effectively with colleagues ranging from entry-level professionals to high-level executives.

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• 12+ years in software engineering, including hands-on system design and delivery of distributed, cloud-based applications.
• Experience leading multiple engineering teams (application, platform, data, DevOps) through managers, with accountability for end-to-end delivery and operations.
• Expertise in modern architectures and practices, including microservices, APIs, cloud-native design, and scalable, resilient systems.
• Strong technical stack experience, including Python, React (or similar), SQL/Snowflake, CI/CD, Docker/Kubernetes, and AWS (or equivalent).
• Proven ownership of engineering strategy and architecture, including roadmaps, platform modernization, and technical debt management.
• Experience delivering and operating enterprise-scale platforms, with focus on reliability, performance, scalability, and security.
• Track record of building and leading high-performing engineering orgs, mentoring leaders and driving engineering excellence through metrics and standards.
• Strong Agile/SDLC execution, including CI/CD, automated testing, and observability.
• Excellent stakeholder leadership and communication, translating technical decisions into business impact.
• Experience leading large-scale transformation, including cloud migration and engineering modernization.
• Ability to manage portfolios, including prioritization, budgets, and delivery across multiple teams.
• Set the strategic direction for generative AI adoption across the software development lifecycle while leading the delivery of enterprise-grade AI products powered by sophisticated agentic workflows.

Preferred Qualifications:

• ITIL certification(s)

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study and/or equivalent work experience 

Preferred Education:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline, or MBA

The hiring range for this position in Orlando, FL is $217,800 to $292,100 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.