Our client is one of the largest and well-known Theme parks and entertainment brands worldwide. They have an average of 200 million+ patrons yearly
They are looking for a contract Senior Backend Software engiineer. This is a hybrid role local to Burbank California. This role is supporting and acting as a shared service supporting Disney Marketing and titles development teams. This is a Senior Java Python, API, CI / CD and AI engineer will be working on applications for their theme parks.
This position is hybrid onsite 2-3 days a week in their Burbank location
Responsibilities
- Work with product partners to design and run experiments for changes to models, prompts, content, retrieval strategies, guardrails, and other variables; track and report metrics using internal tooling and industry-standard AI observability platforms.
- Build or enhance tooling for content gap detection, retrieval diagnostics, prompt evaluation, and automated guardrails to minimize poor / unexpected outputs.
- Help define and monitor key KPIs (e.g., precision / recall, MRR / NDCG, answer accuracy, coverage, and latency) and maintain dashboards that reflect quality and reliability over time.
- Investigate and determine root cause for specific search and answer issues in partnership with product and operations (e.g., content gaps, retrieval / pipeline problems, prompt quality, code bugs, configuration or business rule errors).
- Implement fixes directly or coordinate with the appropriate engineering and content teams to mitigate issues and prevent regressions.
- Identify classes of issues, propose product improvements, and design technical solutions to improve relevance, answer quality, and recommendation performance at scale.
- Own triage in a hypercare role after releases : ensure issues are logged, prioritized, assigned, and driven to closure with clear communication and SLAs.
- Document findings, playbooks, and runbooks; create repeatable processes for RCA, experimentation, and hypercare operations.
Required Skills & Experience
Strong software engineering skills in Java and Python, with experience building back-end services, APIs, pipelines, and integrations.Hands-on experience with search technologies and Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG), including vector embeddings, chunking strategies, and prompt building.Practical knowledge of when and how to use LLMs to improve efficiency and quality, including prompt design / tuning, guardrails, and fallback strategies.Proven root cause analysis (RCA) capabilities : ability to trace issues across data, retrieval, prompts, models, and code; skilled at identifying patterns and proposing systemic fixes.Excellent communication, relationship-building, and cross-team coordination skills;comfortable serving as a liaison between product operations and engineering.Experience with experimentation frameworks and A / B testing, defining success metrics, and interpreting results to drive decisions.Familiarity with AI observability and monitoring tools for prompt / model performance, drift detection, and error tracking.Proficiency with CI / CD, version control, automated testing, and feature flagging.Strong bias for action; able to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment and follow through from issue detection to mitigation.
Desired Skills & Experience
Experience applying security best practices to application, system, and public cloud infrastructure.
What You Will Be Doing
60% Java / Python20% CI / CD40% AI tech developmentThe Offer
65-85 / hravailable for W2 CT employee benefits401k optional