Lead Machine Learning Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Glendale, CA

1d • $141,900 - $199,400 • Onsite

About The Position

The News ML team is responsible for building robust data pipelines and advanced machine learning platforms that deliver personalized experiences to users across ABC News, Good Morning America, and local news stations. Our services leverage machine learning models to enable real-time content personalization and targeted distribution across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms, ensuring that users receive the most relevant and engaging news content tailored to their interests. Our mission is to drive seamless, resilient, and low-latency personalized content delivery at scale, while continuously advancing our ML infrastructure and recommendation algorithms. As a Lead Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a leading role in shaping the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will drive infrastructure for scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, conduct in-depth data exploration and analysis, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to power exceptional, personalized guest experiences. Your work will directly support strategic initiatives to help shape the roadmap for algorithmic innovation while ensuring that solutions are scalable, impactful, and aligned with stakeholder needs.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years of hands-on experience developing and deploying machine learning systems in production
• Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods to solve real-world engineering problems
• Comfortable operating at all levels of the predictive stack, including data collection, data analysis, feature engineering, batch training and low-latency online serving
• Experience designing and developing backend microservices for large-scale distributed systems using REST
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize)
• Familiarity with developing and deploying Spark and ML pipelines
• Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, Kafka
• Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills, with the ability to inspire and empower a team towards achieving business goals
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring such as Datadog
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments
• Excellent communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment

Responsibilities

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from technical design through production deployment and operational excellence
• Design and develop infrastructure supporting the full cycle of machine learning, including data pipelines and workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tools, and feature libraries
• Drive data and ML-driven solutions for diverse engineering use cases such as recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, RAGs
• Partner with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions
• Strategically prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to deliver the highest-impact and most time-sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks to ensure successful execution
• Champion engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response
• Mentor and coach engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to technical documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams

Benefits

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

What This Job Offers

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