Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Lead Machine Learning Engineer

About the Role

Join Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology as a Lead Machine Learning Engineer, where you will be at the forefront of creating magical viewing experiences for Disney's beloved stories. This role involves transforming Disney's media business for the future by evolving streaming and digital products, powering worldwide advertising and distribution, and delivering unmatched entertainment and sports content.

Key Responsibilities

• Algorithm Development and Maintenance: Utilize cutting-edge machine learning methods to develop and implement production algorithms for personalization, recommendation, and other predictive systems. Maintain algorithms deployed to production and explain methodologies to both technical and non-technical teams.

• Feature Engineering and Optimization: Develop and maintain ETL pipelines using orchestration tools such as Airflow and Jenkins. Deploy scalable streaming and batch data pipelines to support petabyte-scale datasets.

• Development Best Practices: Maintain existing and establish new algorithm development, testing, and deployment standards.

• Collaboration: Work with product and business stakeholders to identify and define new personalization opportunities. Collaborate with other data teams to improve data collection, experimentation, and analysis.

• Problem Solving: Ability to gauge the complexity of machine learning problems and execute simple approaches for quick, effective solutions as appropriate.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or a comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years of experience developing machine learning models, performing large-scale data analysis, and/or data engineering experience.
• 5+ years writing production-level, scalable code (e.g., Python, Scala).
• 5+ years of experience developing algorithms for deployment to production systems.
• In-depth understanding of modern machine learning (e.g., deep learning methods), models, and their mathematical underpinnings.
• Experience deploying and maintaining pipelines (AWS, Docker, Airflow) and in engineering big-data solutions using technologies like Databricks, S3, and Spark.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field.
• Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale and familiarity with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance.
• Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases.
• Building streaming data pipelines using Kafka, Spark, or Flink.

Why Disney?

• Innovation: Develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment, and news.
• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms built and operated by this group delight millions of consumers every minute of every day.

Location

This position is based in New York, NY, and requires on-site work.

Compensation

The hiring range for this position in New York is $172,300-$231,100 per year. The base pay offered will take into account internal equity and may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

Join us and be part of a team that is building the future of Disney’s media business, where every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.