Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

DE&E Platform Software Engineering team is responsible for building and maintaining all the core platforms and systems behind our consumer-facing and business products, including Identity, Growth and Lifecycle, Personalization, Client Facing APIs, Back End Engineering for consumer products and gaming/fantasy platforms, as well as other internal tools and engineering services.

The Engagement Experiences & Platforms team innovates and creates experiences to delight, engage & retain our guests on Disney+, Hulu, Star+, ESPN Fantasy and ABC News. It also builds foundational platforms that enable scaling experiences with guest volume and the diversity of use cases across our brands.

Our team is…

• A group of engineers and data scientists with diverse expertise delivering solutions together.

• Collaborative and dynamic.

• Embracing agile practices.

• Using continuous integration/automated testing.

• Led by startup veterans.

This Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization and Recommendations is a position within the Engagement Experiences & Platforms team of The Walt Disney Company’s Entertainment and ESPN Technology group.

This role reports to Data Team Lead, Personalization and Recommendations.

If hired, you will play a meaningful role in the evolving experiences across consumer facing digital products, with responsibilities for the technical design and implementation of projects and features.

We are looking for you if you are:

• Highly adaptable and committed to learning

• Have a track record of delivering solutions utilizing Python

• Thrive in an agile and collaborative environment.

Responsibilities

• Develop machine learning applications according to requirements

• Design ML data pipelines to serve models real-time at scale

• Work closely with the Data Science team to productionize ML models and algorithms

• Utilize cutting edge machine learning methods to develop algorithms for personalization, recommendation, and other predictive systems; maintain algorithms deployed to production

• Work with stakeholders including the Executive, Product, Data and Design teams to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs.

• Collaborate with internal & external teams to define requirements and delivery schedules for projects

• Design and deliver high quality code and make critical contributions working with others

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• BS, BA, or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, or its equivalent

• Minimum 7 years hands-on professional experience with back-end systems development

• Robust programming skills and strong experience with Python

• Familiarity with machine learning frameworks (like Keras or PyTorch) and libraries (like scikit-learn)

• Proven experience as a Machine Learning Engineer or similar role

• Experience with MLOps tools (like Kubeflow, MLFlow or equivalent) is a plus

• Advanced working SQL knowledge and experience working with relational databases, query authoring as well as working familiarity with a variety of databases.

• Experience building and optimizing data pipelines, architectures and data sets.

• Experience with Java is a plus

• Experience with the following technologies is a plus: AWS, Python Asyncio, FastAPI, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Postgresql, serverless computing

• Comprehensive understanding of HTTP/S, APIs, and web services

• Exposure to full lifecycle of application development, including practices like continuous integration, unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.

• Ability to collaborate in a small, productive development team as well as the larger engineering organization. Embrace a highly collaborative team that rewards quality code and effective communication

• Motivated self-starter with the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; can effectively articulate complex ideas and influence others through well-reasoned explanations

• Write efficient, reliable, and maintainable code whether implementing architectural improvements, user-facing features, or fixing defects

• Troubleshoot and resolve issues, problems, and errors encountered across our various platforms

• Analyze and optimize application code for efficiency, reliability, and performance

• Understand product architecture, assisting other Software Architects as necessary