Sr 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 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 nonpersonalized 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 availability requirements of production search.
• Own training pipeline code and model deployment workflows for your models end-to-end, from training data through artifact deployment, using the team's Databricks-based infrastructure.
• Instrument production search ML systems with metrics, logging, and alerting; participate in on-call rotation for search ML components.

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience developing and deploying machine learning models in production environments.
• Production-quality Python; strong working knowledge of SQL.
• Experience building or operating search ranking, recommendation, or similar retrieval systems at scale.
• Experience deploying and operating ML systems in cloud environments (AWS); comfort with distributed data processing at scale (e.g., Spark) and production observability practices.

·         Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfort explaining algorithmic tradeoffs to non-technical partners

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting real‑time personalization, recommendation, or analytics systems.
• Familiarity with feature stores, event‑driven architectures, and real‑time ML pipelines.
• Exposure to ML infrastructure concepts such as inference pipelines, data validation, and model lifecycle tooling.
• Experience optimizing data systems for latency, throughput, and cost efficiency.
• Understanding of experimentation platforms and data instrumentation for online systems.

Required Education  

·         Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

PAY TRANSPARENCY

The hiring range for this position in LA is $144,100- $193,200. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also 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.

This position is with Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology.

To learn more about Disney's guidelines on the use of AI for candidates, click here.

Disney Entertainment & Sports LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION FOR EMPLOYMENT APPLICATIONS

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

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