Sr Machine Learning Engineer

Job  
Location Santa Monica, California, United States Business Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Date posted Oct. 29, 2026

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.

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.

Job Summary

The Search Engineering team owns the backend systems that power search across Disney+ and Hulu: from the viewer-facing API, search index and ranking models, to the pipelines, configuration, and tooling that power them. We determine what millions of users find when they search for content.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will be expected to lead search algorithm research, development, and productionization for existing and new product areas. You will identify opportunities to advance search quality on your own initiatives.

You will collaborate with Product and Engineering Leadership to align on search quality goals; with Data Analytics to ensure offline and online evaluation methodology is sound; and with Software Engineers, Data Engineers, and other ML engineers on the team, including those focused on ML platform work, to design systems that are reliable and maintainable at scale

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Contribute to the ongoing development of the team's search ranking system: iterating on model architecture, feature selection, training signal design, and integration of user context signals to improve ranking quality across personalized and non personalized traffic.
• Evaluate model performance against offline and online metrics. Collaborate on hypothesis formulation, experimental design, and the implementation of A/B tests.
• Maintain production search ranking systems and serve as the technical point of contact in collaboration with Product and Data Analytics.
• Work with Data Engineers on feature engineering workflows that produce the training data and behavioral signals that feed search ranking models
• Build and operate ML inference systems for search ranking, meeting the latency and…