The Director of AI Enablement and Legal Engineering listing went up Sept. 24. It asks for a licensed attorney to redesign the same department Horacio Gutierrez said will get “much smaller.”
Disney’s legal department got a warning about layoffs on Sept. 18. On Sept. 24, the same department posted a new director job built around artificial intelligence.
The listing is for a Director, AI Enablement and Legal Engineering, based in Burbank or New York, per Disney’s careers site. It pays $185,500 to $248,800 in California and $196,600 to $260,600 in New York. The Hollywood Reporter first reported the posting on Sept. 25.
The person who gets it will be asked to “design end-to-end AI solutions” for legal work, build document pipelines for contract and regulatory review, and decide when Disney should build its own AI tools versus buy them.
What did Disney’s legal chief say in the layoffs memo?
That the department is going to shrink, and that some people reading the memo would be affected.
Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal and global affairs officer, sent the memo on Sept. 18, per THR, citing Deadline’s earlier report. He told staff the department “will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process.”
He described the plan as “taking a dispassionate look at every aspect of how we do our work, so we can do it in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.”
The tools he listed included “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies,” moving some tasks to self-service, using alternative legal providers and outsourcing.
“Obviously, this will require hard choices about where and how we deploy our resources and investments, including our staffing investments,” Gutierrez wrote.
Disney declined to comment to THR on the memo or on the timing of the cuts.
What does Disney’s AI Enablement director actually do?
Redesign how the lawyers work, using the technology the memo described.
The posting asks for a Juris Doctor, an active law license and at least 10 years in legal practice, operations, technology or consulting. It calls the job “AI-enabled process engineering, workflow modernization, automation” across the whole Legal and Global Affairs group.
It also asks the director to measure return on investment and help lawyers adopt the new workflows. In plain terms, the hire will build the systems that do some of the work people in the department do now, then track how much that saves.
The listing went live six days after the memo.
Is Disney cutting jobs beyond the legal department?
Yes, and it has been all year.
Disney laid off roughly 1,000 workers across its studio and television units earlier in 2026, per THR. In August, the company said again that it’s focused on “reducing costs across the enterprise.”
Chief financial officer Hugh Johnston told investors in May that Disney is “using technology to fundamentally change how work gets done.” The legal memo and the AI posting are the first time that line has shown up in one department in the same week.
Disney’s stock is down about 5 percent this year and nearly 40 percent since 2021, per THR.
When will the Disney legal layoffs happen?
Disney hasn’t said. The memo gave no date, and the company isn’t commenting.
Gutierrez has run Disney’s legal department since 2022, after joining from Spotify. His memo framed the changes as a process rather than a single round, which usually means cuts arrive in stages.
The AI director posting, meanwhile, is open now.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
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Disney Careers (posted Sept. 24, 2026), the job listing, salary ranges and requirements
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The Hollywood Reporter (Sept. 25, 2026), the posting report, the memo quotes and company context, citing Deadline for the memo
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