Lead Software Engineer - ML Data Systems

Lead Product Software Engineer - ML Data Systems

Job  
Location New York, New York, United States / Glendale, California, United States Business Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Date posted Jun. 16, 2026

Department/Group Overview:

ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Sports News & Entertainment 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 ESPN’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.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

ESPN is building a new real‑time short‑form video recommendation system that will be the foundation of our next‑generation personalization experience. High‑quality data is at the core of this effort. We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer with deep expertise in building scalable distributed systems, platform services, and data‑intensive applications that power personalized user experiences. In this role, you will work closely with Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Product, and Platform teams to design and deliver the foundational systems, APIs, data platforms, and infrastructure that support real‑time personalization and recommendation services at ESPN scale.

• Design, build, and operate highly scalable software systems and services that support content discovery, personalization, and recommendation experiences.
• Develop and maintain distributed data processing platforms and service architectures that power both online and offline product workflows.
• Build foundational platform capabilities, including feature serving, model inference integration, experimentation infrastructure, and recommendation delivery services.
• Design reliable APIs and service interfaces that enable personalization capabilities across multiple ESPN products and surfaces.
• Lead architecture and technical design efforts for systems that must operate with high availability, low latency, and large‑scale traffic demands.
• Partner with Machine Learning, Data Science, Product, and Platform Engineering teams to translate business objectives into scalable software solutions.
• Establish engineering standards, operational best practices, monitoring, observability, and reliability mechanisms across critical systems.
• Drive technical strategy and execution for next‑generation personalization platforms and services.
• Mentor engineers and influence engineering practices across teams through technical leadership, design reviews, and architectural guidance.

• 7+ years of experience building…