Sr. Backend Software Engineer / Java / Python / API / CICD / A.I / RAG / RCA / Glendale

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 / Python
• 20% CI/CD
• 40% AI tech development

The Offer

• 65-85/hr
• available for W2 CT employee benefits
• 401k optional

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