Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Walt Disney Animation Studios’ world-class filmmakers, artists, and technical collaborators create the magic of animation. The SRE team within the Platform & Infrastructure department at Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) focuses on optimizing service deployments and improving system availability, latency, performance, and observability. We build performant infrastructure that artists use daily to create our celebrated animated content.

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will drive the design, implementation, and operation of reliable, scalable infrastructure across the studio. This role partners closely with team members and stakeholders to evaluate emerging technologies, translate requirements into production-ready solutions, and ensure operational excellence through automation, observability, and reliability engineering practices.

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. Bring your unique talents, passion and ideas to our team, and be a part of Disney’s creative legacy!

Responsibilities

● Design, implement, and support robust on-premises and cloud-native deployments using infrastructure-as-code, security automation, and continuous improvement, while maintaining high reliability standards through comprehensive observability, SLIs/SLOs, and performance optimization

● Securely deploy, operate, and support AI-powered tools and ML infrastructure within a production environment

● Collaborate with stakeholders throughout the studio to understand workflows and translate business requirements into end-to-end platform and infrastructure solutions

● Contribute to the design, operation, and evolution of SRE managed technologies, including CI/CD platforms, Git source management, cloud hosting, containerization, and web technologies such as Apache HTTPd and NGINX

● Develop meaningful telemetry, alerting, and operational runbooks to maximize service visibility and minimize mean time to repair (MTTR)

● Evaluate emerging technologies and operationalize new functionality by creating documented standards and reusable patterns to encourage adoption

● Build internal tooling to enable the SRE team to efficiently isolate, diagnose, and resolve platform, service, and application issues

Key Qualifications:

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

● 5+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, technical operations, systems engineering, software engineering, and/or related disciplines

● Expertise in distributed systems, networking, hardware architecture, and capacity planning

● Proven ability to lead and collaborate on large-scale cross-team projects with strong verbal and written communication skills

● Proficiency in UNIX/Linux administration, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and security

● Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana, including AI-specific metrics such as model benchmarking, inference latency, and token consumption

● Proficient with containerization and orchestration systems in enterprise production environments (e.g., Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, Rancher, AWS ECS and EKS)

● Experience with configuration management and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Helm, CloudFormation, Puppet, and Ansible)

● Experience implementing enterprise MLOps infrastructure that enables validation, deployment, fallback, multi-model routing, load balancing, quota management, inference metrics, and provider abstraction (leveraging technologies such as AWS Bedrock, JFrog Artifactory, and LiteLLM)

● Experience with continuous integration tools (e.g., Jenkins, Gitlab CI/CD, AWS CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Spinnaker)

● Expertise in architecting, deploying, and maintaining scalable solutions within cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)

● Experience with secrets management and data protection (e.g., HashiCorp Vault) ● Proficient in one or more languages such as Python, Java, Scala, Go, Rust, or Ruby

Bonus Qualifications:

● Experience within a Film Production environment

● Experience in web server administration

● Knowledge of securing MLOps deployments through implementing LLM and MCP gateways and security scanning (e.g., JFrog Xray)

● Knowledge of with setting up and maintaining cloud/on-prem runtime environments for AI agents (e.g., AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Google Vertex AI Agent Engine, Temporal)

● Knowledge of provisioning, monitoring, and maintaining GPU infrastructure (e.g., NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, cuDNN, NVML), including GPU virtualization and partitioning (e.g., NVIDIA MIG), and optimizing utilization for inference workloads

● Knowledge of with model serving and inference frameworks (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, Ray Serve, Ollama / llama.cpp) with foundational knowledge of how LLMs are loaded and executed

The Walt Disney Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

PAY TRANSPARENCY

The hiring range for this position in California is $144,100 - $193,200 per year based on a 40 hour work week. The amount of hours scheduled per week may vary based on business needs. 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.

This position is with Walt Disney Pictures, 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.

Walt Disney Pictures is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION FOR EMPLOYMENT APPLICATIONS

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

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