Lead Data Scientist, Content Intelligence

Department/Group Overview:

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:

1. 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.

2. 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. 

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

Content Platforms & Operations is responsible for the development and ongoing advancement of the technical and operational functions driving the worldwide distribution and monetization of Disney’s linear networks and theatrical content. This includes Disney’s media supply chain and storage, network and theatrical distribution operations, media localization, network transmission and origination, and more. The global team also plays a critical role as the primary collaboration point for Product & Technology with Disney’s EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regional business teams.

Job Summary:

The Content Platforms team manages a diverse suite of products and services that power Disney’s media supply chain, enabling content delivery for iconic brands like Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, ABC, Marvel, and Star Wars.

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Data Scientist to help us develop and deploy techniques that can understand our media. This is a hands-on role for a builder and systems thinker who can take ideas from a concept to a functional, high-performance prototype with speed and ingenuity.

In this role you will:

• Collaborate with product and technology teams across the globe.
• Conceptualize and co-develop innovative AI/ML solutions to address complex business challenges in the media space, contributing to a culture of rapid innovation.
• Identify systematic frameworks for prompt engineering and evaluation, ensuring VLM outputs meet strict ground truth requirements.
• Develop rigorous evaluation metrics (beyond standard accuracy) to validate model performance for temporal tasks
• Bridge experimentation and production through partnership with product and engineering teams, ensuring experimental models are aligned with business needs, optimized for inference and can be seamlessly integrated into our cloud platforms.
• Establish and refine best practices for the application of generative and non-generative AI/ML techniques, ensuring optimal performance for both experimental and production use cases.
• Develop statistical analyses to validate model performance and business impact.
• Actively experiment with emerging techniques like PEFT (LoRA/QLoRA), Quantization, and Vector embeddings-based media retrieval

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Create and Maintain Data Science Solutions: Design, create, test, and document prototypes aligned with business objectives and engineering standards, on a clear path to production.
• Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams: Work closely with software engineers and product teams to ensure data science solutions effectively support business goals and content strategies.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

We’re looking for a candidate that meets these basic requirements:

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related scientific/engineering field.
• At least 7 years of relevant industry experience in data science. 
• Proficient in Python, and extensive experience with libraries such as Pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major deep learning framework, such as PyTorch, and experience with LLM prompting and fine-tuning.
• Solid understanding of the full lifecycle of a machine learning project, from data exploration and feature engineering to model deployment and monitoring.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to convey complex analytical findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with cloud platforms, including storage, compute, and ML services such as AWS S3, Bedrock, EC2, and SageMaker or Databricks.

After the basic requirements, below are our preferred requirements.

You don’t need to meet all of these, but it would be advantageous to meet one or more:

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related scientific/engineering field.
• Previous work experience in media or entertainment technology, particularly in content distribution and the media supply chain.
• VLM / LLM model distillation.
• Expertise in advanced statistical techniques and experimental design.
• Experience with generative AI for media understanding, including video, image, and text analysis.
• Experience working with development teams across multiple regions, time zones, and cultures.
• A strong curiosity about how Disney delivers the Magic and a desire to be a part of it.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position is $155,700 - $208,700 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.