Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

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Job
Location Glendale, California;
Santa Monica, California;
Seattle, Washington
Date posted Jan. 26, 2026

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.

• 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: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, ABC News, and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories 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 Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry‑leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value across all media platforms.

The Ad Platform Engineering organization within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology builds, enhances, and operates a high‑performance, distributed, micro‑service‑based digital advertising platform. This platform powers billions of real‑time ad decisions daily across Disney’s video‑on‑demand and live TV properties, including Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, and more.

Within Ad Platform Engineering, the Programmatic teams build and maintain Disney’s programmatic advertising suite of products and services, comprising Disney’s Real‑time Ad Exchange (DRAX). DRAX is an award‑winning, proprietary supply‑side platform (SSP) that enables programmatic deal configuration and integrates demand from multiple third‑party sources into Disney’s ad server in real time.

• Apply modern machine learning techniques to advertising use cases such as inventory forecasting, pricing, targeting, and efficient ad delivery.
• Design, implement, and iterate on ML solutions from experimentation through production deployment and ongoing optimization.
• Build and scale ML architectures that balance model quality, latency, throughput, reliability, and cost.
• Design and maintain feature pipelines and feature stores supporting both realtime inference and offline training.
• Own major components of the model lifecycle, including experimentation, validation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Analyze experimental results and partner with product and engineering stakeholders to support data‑informed decisions.
• Ensure models are observable, debuggable, and explainable in production environments.
• Implement monitoring for model performance, drift, bias, and overall system health.
• Contribute to engineering excellence through high‑quality code, sound system design, and operational best practices.
• Provide technical guidance through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Minimum 3 years of hands‑on experience developing and deploying machine learning systems in production.
• Strong knowledge of machine learning fundamentals, mathematics, and statistics.
• Experience operating ML systems in low‑latency, high‑throughput environments.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with both technical and non‑technical partners.
• Solid foundations in algorithms, data structures, and numerical optimization.
• Proficiency in Python (primary), with experience in Java and SQL.
• Experience with modern ML frameworks and tooling such as Tensor Flow, PyTorch, and Hugging Face.
• Experie…