Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer - Customer Support Systems

The Walt Disney Company • Santa Monica, CA

64d • $175,800 - $246,400

About The Position

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. The Commerce, Growth & Identity (CGI) team is dedicated to three business-critical areas at Disney that will help transform its media business. We build innovative and cutting-edge capabilities to drive subscriptions, engagement and monetization across Disney’s streaming and digital products. We enable the wide range of Disney brands to connect and engage with consumers through a unified identity, powered by shared services that are trustworthy and seamless to integrate with. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer with a passion for cutting-edge AI to drive impactful solutions in the Customer Support domain. This role offers the opportunity to lead applied research and engineering efforts that bring intelligent automation and personalized experiences to millions of customers across Disney’s media platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field; PhD is a plus.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and evaluating LLM based solutions.
• Minimum 7 years of related work experience in building, deploying, and evaluating real-world machine learning solutions.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and other relevant programming languages.
• Experience with data wrangling and analysis tools such as Pandas, NumPy, and working knowledge of databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with big data and workflow platforms, including Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, Airflow, Jupyter, and GitHub.
• Proven experience leading end-to-end ML project lifecycles, including model design, experimentation, product deployment, CI/CD for ML pipelines, and ongoing monitoring.
• Excellent problem-solving abilities, with strong communication and collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with Amazon Web Services.
• Experience with Tableau, Power BI, or similar platforms.
• Experience building anomaly detection models.

Responsibilities

• Rapidly analyze and prototype AI-driven solutions that address key pain points for both customers using self-service systems and customer service (CS) agents interacting with internal tooling.
• Own and maintain production AI systems, including those leveraging large language models (LLMs); this includes optimization, fine-tuning, and debugging to ensure robustness and performance at scale.
• Bridge customer support needs with commerce platform capabilities, identifying which problems can be solved using existing infrastructure and which require new AI-powered solutions.
• Assess the effectiveness of deployed AI solutions through a data-driven lens, continuously iterating on what works and sunsetting or replacing what doesn’t deliver meaningful impact.
• Collaborate with other AI-focused teams across Disney Streaming, sharing innovations and adopting best practices to drive consistency, scalability, and impact in AI initiatives.

Benefits

• A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package.
• Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees