Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Job ID 10100856 Location Santa Monica, California, United States / San Francisco, California, United States / New York, New York, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States Business Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology Date posted Oct. 09, 2024

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"There are so many opportunities to grow and learn within Disney! There is never a dull moment at work."

Diana, Principal Counsel

Job Summary:

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we are reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that is evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you would love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E (Disney Entertainment & ESPN) Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

The vision of the Machine Learning (ML) Engineering team at Disney is to drive and enable ML usage across several domains in heterogeneous language environments and at all stages of a project’s life cycle, including ad-hoc exploration, preparing training data, model development, and robust production deployment. The team is invested in continual innovation on the ML infrastructure itself to carefully orchestrate a continuous cycle of learning, inference, and observation while also maintaining high system availability and reliability. We seek to maximize the positive business impact of all ML at Disney streaming by supporting key product functions like personalization and recommendation, fraud and abuse prevention, capacity planning, subscriber growth and lifecycle intelligence, and so on.

In this role You will be expected to lead recommendation and personalization algorithm research, development, implementation, and optimization for product areas, and work on event and context processors to federate data, infrastructure and tooling to enable event-driven ML pipelines. You will own and expand part of our central feature store that powers ML use cases in domains like recommendations, search and fraud. You will work on cross-functional projects and push the envelope on data and ML infrastructure.

What You Will Do

Algorithm Development and Maintenance: Utilize cutting edge machine learning methods to deploy and develop algorithms for personalization, recommendation, and other predictive systems; maintain algorithms deployed to production and be the point person in explaining methodologies to 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
Collaborate with product and business stakeholders: Identify and define new personalization opportunities and work with other data teams to improve how we do data collection, experimentation and analysis

What You Will Bring

Basic Qualifications

7+ years of relevant experience developing machine learning models, performing large-scale data analysis, and/or data engineering experience
7+ years of experience 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
Strong written and verbal communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field

Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale
Experience building and deploying full stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment
Ability to gauge the complexity of machine learning problems and a willingness to execute simple approaches for quick, effective solutions as appropriate
Familiar 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
Experience with: AWS, Docker, Airflow, Databricks

Required Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or related quantitative field or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, California is $164,500 - 220,600 per year and in San Francisco, California is $180,200 - $241,600 per year. The hiring range for this position in New York and Seattle, Washington is $172,300 - $231,100 per year. 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.

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About Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at the vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

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

Disney Streaming Technology LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. 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.

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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, email Candidate.Accommodations@Disney.com with your request. This email address is not for general employment inquiries or correspondence. 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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Explore this Location Santa Monica, CA

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