Lead Data Scientist, Content Intelligence

The Walt Disney Company • Bristol, CT

2d

About The Position

The Content Platforms team manages a diverse suite of products and services that power Disney’s media supply chain, enabling content delivery for iconic brands like Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, ABC, Marvel, and Star Wars. We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Data Scientist to help us develop and deploy techniques that can understand our media. This is a hands-on role for a builder and systems thinker who can take ideas from a concept to a functional, high-performance prototype with speed and ingenuity. In this role you will: Collaborate with product and technology teams across the globe. Conceptualize and co-develop innovative AI/ML solutions to address complex business challenges in the media space, contributing to a culture of rapid innovation. Identify systematic frameworks for prompt engineering and evaluation, ensuring VLM outputs meet strict ground truth requirements. Develop rigorous evaluation metrics (beyond standard accuracy) to validate model performance for temporal tasks Bridge experimentation and production through partnership with product and engineering teams, ensuring experimental models are aligned with business needs, optimized for inference and can be seamlessly integrated into our cloud platforms. Establish and refine best practices for the application of generative and non-generative AI/ML techniques, ensuring optimal performance for both experimental and production use cases. Develop statistical analyses to validate model performance and business impact. Actively experiment with emerging techniques like PEFT (LoRA/QLoRA), Quantization, and Vector embeddings-based media retrieval

Requirements

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related scientific/engineering field.
• At least 7 years of relevant industry experience in data science.
• Proficient in Python, and extensive experience with libraries such as Pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major deep learning framework, such as PyTorch, and experience with LLM prompting and fine-tuning.
• Solid understanding of the full lifecycle of a machine learning project, from data exploration and feature engineering to model deployment and monitoring.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to convey complex analytical findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience with cloud platforms, including storage, compute, and ML services such as AWS S3, Bedrock, EC2, and SageMaker or Databricks.

Nice To Haves

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related scientific/engineering field.
• Previous work experience in media or entertainment technology, particularly in content distribution and the media supply chain.
• VLM / LLM model distillation.
• Expertise in advanced statistical techniques and experimental design.
• Experience with generative AI for media understanding, including video, image, and text analysis.
• Experience working with development teams across multiple regions, time zones, and cultures.
• A strong curiosity about how Disney delivers the Magic and a desire to be a part of it.

Responsibilities

• Create and Maintain Data Science Solutions: Design, create, test, and document prototypes aligned with business objectives and engineering standards, on a clear path to production.
• Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams: Work closely with software engineers and product teams to ensure data science solutions effectively support business goals and content strategies.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level