Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Research

Overview

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

This position will be responsible for working across multiple machine learning areas with primary focus on specialization in generative AI applications, including generative mixed media, language models, and other agentic multimodal technologies. Areas of work may include generative video, generative image, generative audio, chatbots, LLM applications, and mixed agentic workflows. Work will additionally include traditional machine learning applications as well, including development of classical ML models to optimize advertisement marketplace operations.

Our mission is to advance AI and machine learning capabilities across Ad Platform by delivering scalable, high impact AI/ML and data science solutions that enhance generative advertisement creation and enhancement, as well as supporting efforts in more traditional AI application spaces such as Ad marketplace optimization, forecasting, and related ML and generative AI experimentation.

We are seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to join this innovative team. This role offers a unique leadership opportunity for an experienced ML engineer who thrives at the intersection of technical excellence, emerging technology, strategic impact, and cross-functional collaboration, across both generative AI and traditional ML applications.

• Develop, optimize, and product ionize innovative technologies in generative AI (mixed media, video, and agentic LLM applications) as well as in traditional ML modeling applications.
• Create, evaluate, improve, optimize technologies
• Drive innovation and apply state of the art AI and machine learning across advertising domains, including inventory forecasting, ad experience, ad pacing, pricing, targeting, and efficient ad delivery.
• Invent and iterate on novel solutions to complex advertising challenges with rapid prototyping and deployment cycles.
• Design, build, and scale robust ML systems that power core ad platform capabilities
• Champion engineering excellence through best practices in code quality, system design, and operational reliability.
• Mentor and support junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical growth.

• Bachelor's in computer science or equivalent experience.
• Prior experience rigorously developing, researching, and/or product ionizing any of the following generative AI modeling or AI-based editing domains: image, video, mixed media, audio, LLMs, or…