Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally. 

• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Ad Platform Machine Learning

Ad Platform builds Disney’s industry-leading advertising technology, supporting sports, news, and entertainment content across all major media platforms. Our systems handle high-scale, high-throughput, revenue-critical workloads.

Our mission is to advance machine learning capabilities across Ad Platform by delivering scalable, high impact ML and data science solutions that enhance various aspects of ad serving. We build solutions to measure and optimize every aspect of the advertising life cycle. Our tenant is a strong cross-domain team to deliver E2E solutions for machine learning and data science.

Our team is seeking a principal machine learning engineer who will be an outstanding addition and leading development for prediction or optimization engines for addressable ad platforms. The right person for this role should be experienced in crafting implementation for either machine learning technologies or data-driven algorithms. If you are someone who is proactive, inquisitive, and innovative in these domains, this is a phenomenal role for you!

As our team's Principal Software Engineer, you will apply your battle-tested experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems including Machine Learning  technologies, and leadership skills to unblock and guide our ML, research and functional teams to create scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position, ideal for leaders who enjoy staying close to architecture, design, and machine learning models—while building strong engineering organizations. You’ll guide teams to design and build scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines in various domains using industry best practices which are aligned in close collaboration with the ML team in the US highlighting cross-functional collaboration. You’ll work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.

What You’ll Do

• Apply state of the art ML to the Innovation and Creative Platforms for Ad Experiences

• Leverage novel backend and/or ML solutions for complex ad serving challenges with fast turnaround

• Drive design and implementation of LLM and GenAI related applications ensuring scalable and efficient approaches for large scale data analysis and model development

• Provide Prompt Engineering support to different functional team

• Identify and experiment models from training, testing, production rollout to continuous optimization. Lead the ad algorithm architecture design and iterations for models

• Collaborate with engineering teams, product managers, and program managers in an open and creative environment to design, implement and productionalize solutions

• Mentor team members and support their technical growth

• Leverage observability tools to provide visibility into performance of AI/ML and other backend solutions

• Support on-call activities on a rotational basis

What makes this role unique

• Global impact from India: You’ll be part of Disney India innovation hub and work with talented builders creating impact on customers across geography. You will lead platforms that power global products like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC—used by millions of people worldwide.

• Strong ownership: Disney India is a core engineering hub. Ad Platform leaders have complete ownership and autonomy of architecture, delivery, and people development.

• Leadership Development: Build and mentor senior engineers and managers, shaping the future of Disney’s engineering leadership in India.

• Work-Life Harmony: Disney India values work-life harmony. We provide flexibility as part of work culture, including flexible workdays and hours.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent experience

• At least 10 years of working experience on large scale machine learning

• Strong knowledge of and experience implementing AI/ML technologies and applying mathematical and statistical concepts

• Proficient in Java, Python, Scala, large scale ML/DL platforms and processing tech stack

• Ability to collaborate with and lead projects across cross-functional teams such as Product Management, Architecture, and other Engineering teams

• Passionate about understanding the ad business, applying advanced research to relevant business scenarios, and seeking innovation opportunities to enhance business effectiveness

• Passionate about technology, open to interdisciplinary collaborations, and experienced in building data-driven services and applications

• A proven track record of thriving in a fast-paced, data-driven, and collaborative work environment is required

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the advertising, digital video advertising, or digital marketing domain

• Experience in large scale machine learning using tools such as scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, pytorch

• Experience with LLM-based application development, using LLM-as-a-service providers such as AWS Bedrock, Azure Cognitive Services, or Google's Vertex AI

• Experience using frameworks such as LangGraph, Crew AI, and strands sdk for developing agents

• Experience with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation

• Experience with best practices in agentic development such as LLM guardrails, tool calling, and consistent APIs such as MCP and A2A

• Experience with designing and implementing agentic architectures in multiple modalities such as text, image, video, and audio.

Required Education:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems or related equivalent experience

Preferred Education:

• Master’s degree or PhD in computer science, Information Systems or related equivalent experience