How AMC Theatres scales engineering with a fully integrated global team.
A conversation with Derrick Leggett, CIO of AMC Theatres, on scaling engineering from 170 to 900+ theatres, building an AI-first organization, and why integrated global teams have replaced traditional outsourcing inside one of the world's largest entertainment platforms.
From 170 theatres and no website to the world's largest movie-ticketing platform.
When Derrick Leggett joined AMC twenty years ago, the company operated around 170 theatres. There was no ticketing on the website. There was no mobile app. Technology was a back-office concern.
Today AMC operates over 900 theatres worldwide, more than 550 of them in the US, and runs the largest movie-theatre ticketing platform in the world. The A-List membership program, the multi-tier loyalty program, the annual popcorn subscription — every customer-facing initiative AMC ships is, at its core, a software product.
Most people still don't think of AMC as a technology company. Inside, it is one.
"Technology's gone from being a sideshow to being the center of almost everything we do at AMC."
— Derrick Leggett, CIO, AMC Theatres
If engineers write code twice as fast, the company has to decide twice as fast too.
AMC used to spend three months a year budgeting — 175 projects, two months of meetings, plans that were obsolete before they were approved. Derrick replaced that with a capacity-based budget and a monthly executive-committee review of engineering priorities.
Combined with AI-driven development velocity, the result is an engineering organization that can say "yes" to opportunities that used to be impossible — 30% to 50% more often, faster, without sacrificing quality.
AI-first KPIs across IT
Every person — from the help desk to the CIO — has dedicated AI training and upskilling as a measured outcome.
Vibe coding as the new starting point
Engineers begin with AI-generated output, then shape it for quality, operability, and scale. The work shifts from typing code to applying judgment.
Monthly executive prioritization
An exec-committee review every month (and sometimes intra-month) decides what actually ships next, instead of a 175-project budget bake-off once a year.
Capacity, not project, budgets
Engineering capacity is funded as a baseline — cyber, lifecycle maintenance, customer-facing delivery — and reallocated as priorities shift.
"People who don't adopt AI and learn how to use it are going to be working at 30%, 50%, 80% of what the person sitting next to them is."
— Derrick Leggett, CIO, AMC Theatres
Integrated global teams, not transactional outsourcing.
AMC has engineering talent across the US, South America, India, and the Philippines. Most of it is fully remote. Derrick's framing is simple: hire the best and brightest people who can act as a team, and it doesn't matter where they sit.
What he refuses to do is buy into the traditional outsourcing model — engineers walled off behind a vendor account manager, communicating in statements of work, with 30–40% overhead for layers no one can name. The Full Scale engineers in the Philippines join AMC's standups, work on AMC's tools, and ship code against AMC's roadmap. They are AMC engineers who happen to live in the Philippines.
Same standups, same tools, same hours
Full Scale engineers in the Philippines shift their schedules for US overlap and join AMC's existing rituals. There is no parallel project-manager layer in the middle.
No vendor account stack
AMC isn't paying 30–40% on top for a separate PM, architect, and account team. The engineers are the relationship.
Real human relationships
Derrick and the AMC team travel to the Philippines. Dinners, karaoke, movies, follow-up calls. The bond is what makes the work survive when something inevitably goes wrong.
Talent that can't hide
Without a PM to shield them, Full Scale engineers have to communicate, push back, and own outcomes directly with AMC. The bar is the relationship.
"It's a fully integrated team. It's just some of the people happen to be living in the Philippines."
— Derrick Leggett, CIO, AMC Theatres
Trust first. Everything else is downstream of that.
Derrick and Matt Watson have worked together for 25 years. Long before Full Scale existed, the trust was already in place — earned through years of blunt good news and blunt bad news. When AMC needed to extend its engineering team internationally, that history is what made the leap possible.
Full Scale co-invested in the early engagement so AMC could test the model. The Philippines engineers proved themselves quickly — high-quality work, real communication, and, just as importantly, becoming friends with their US counterparts. Karaoke nights. Dinners. Movie outings. The 13-hour time difference stopped mattering.
"For any long-term staffing relationship to evolve into a partnership, you have to start with trust. You have to lead with trust through the process and adjust with trust when things go wrong."
— Derrick Leggett, CIO, AMC Theatres
The Flutter rewrite that nobody asked for.
AMC had a customer-facing app written in Xamarin. It had served its purpose but stopped scaling. There was no budget for a rewrite, and the day-to-day work was already more than the team could handle.
A group of AMC engineers decided they wanted to do it anyway. Nights, weekends, holidays. They turned the rewrite into Dungeons & Dragons sessions. In a few months they had rebuilt — in Flutter — an application that had taken three years to write the first time.
They brought it to Derrick. He took it to the CEO. Everyone looked at the team like they were insane. Then they shipped it. Derrick now calls it one of the most valuable changes the team has made.
That, he says, is the team he wants — anywhere in the world. Not order-takers.
"I have an idea." Then the team moves mountains.
AMC's CEO has a way of starting calls with "I have an idea." Sometimes the idea is a $70-million revenue opportunity. Sometimes it's pulling off the Taylor Swift Eras Tour theatrical release. Either way, the engineering org has six weeks, not six months.
What makes "yes" possible is the integrated team that's already in place — engineers who know AMC's systems, who trust their leaders, and who get excited about the opportunity instead of being assigned to it. The Full Scale partnership lets AMC extend that team faster, without rebuilding the relationship from scratch every time.
What other engineering leaders can take from AMC's playbook.
Technology became the center, not a sideshow
When Derrick joined, AMC had no e-commerce and no app. Today AMC runs the world's largest movie-theatre ticketing platform and one of the largest loyalty programs in the US.
Decisions move monthly, not annually
AMC scrapped the three-month annual budgeting cycle. The executive committee now reviews engineering priorities every month — sometimes intra-month — so the company can move at the pace the industry now demands.
AI-first across the whole company
Every employee — IT, finance, accounting — is being trained on AI. Engineers are starting with AI-generated code and shifting their judgment to architecture, quality, and operationalization.
Hire for ownership, not order-taking
AMC treats partner engineers as full team members, not contractors behind a project manager. Trust, purpose, and a sense of ownership consistently outperform the transactional staff-aug model.
Trust is the only foundation that scales
A 25-year relationship between Derrick and Matt Watson made it possible for AMC to extend its team internationally. Full Scale's Philippines engineers became part of the family — not a separate vendor stack.
Capacity that flexes with opportunity
When AMC's CEO calls with a $70M revenue idea, Derrick's job is to find a way to ship it. A pre-integrated global team is what makes "yes" possible inside a six-week window.