Senior Machine Learning Engineer

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 Ad Platform Engineering organization builds, enhances, and operates a high‑performance, distributed, microservice‑based digital advertising platform that powers billions of real‑time ad decisions across Disney’s video‑on‑demand and live TV properties.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will design, build, and operate production machine learning systems that directly impact revenue, efficiency, and viewer experience at global scale.

• Strong technical ownership and accountability for production ML systems
• Effective collaboration and communication across engineering, product, and data partners
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and translating loosely defined problems into scalable solutions
• Continuous improvement mindset with attention to performance, reliability, and cost
• Ability to define and use technical and operational metrics to measure system and model health

• Apply modern machine learning techniques to advertising use cases such as inventory forecasting, pricing, targeting, and efficient ad delivery
• Design, implement, and iterate 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 for real‑time inference and offline training
• Own major components of the model lifecycle: 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
• Experience with deep learning, transformer architectures, multimodal embeddings, large language models, or retrieval‑augmented generation
• Experience building systems on cloud‑native infrastructure and distributed platforms
• Proven ability to thrive in a fast‑paced, data‑driven, and collaborative environment

• Experience in digital video advertising or the digital marketing domain
• Experience with programmatic advertising or real‑time bidding platforms
• MS or PhD (preferred) in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

The Walt Disney Company is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and welcomes all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. For reasonable accommodations, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs.