Principal Machine Learning Engineer

The Walt Disney Company • Glendale, CA

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization responsible for building and advancing the technological backbone for Disney’s media business. The team combines technology with creativity to create world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive innovation and scalability. The Product Engineering team is responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms, including product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, and the engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity. The News & Entertainment (N&E) Machine Learning team specifically focuses on building robust data pipelines and advanced machine learning platforms to deliver personalized experiences across Disney's News & Entertainment portfolio (ABC News, ABC Entertainment, National Geographic, Marvel, and Disney Studios). Their mission is to drive seamless, resilient, and low-latency personalized content delivery at scale, while advancing ML infrastructure and recommendation algorithms.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments, with a track record of owning large, complex problem spaces
• Deep expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, and statistical methods applied to real-world, large-scale engineering problems
• Demonstrated experience owning architecture across a significant platform or product domain - including authoring architecture documents, driving reviews, and leading implementation
• Proven ability to drive quantifiable improvements in ML platform capabilities, personalization quality, or recommendation system performance
• Experience designing and evolving backend microservices for large-scale distributed systems using REST
• Strong expertise with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize)
• Deep hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Spark, Kinesis, and Kafka
• Experience leading incident response for high priority incidents and driving reliability programs across a team or platform
• Active participation in cross-organizational engineering communities, standards-setting, and architectural governance
• Proven track record as a metrics-driven technical leader who connects engineering decisions to business outcomes
• Exceptional communication, influence, and collaboration skills — comfortable presenting to and aligning senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments with strong prioritization and stakeholder management skills

Nice To Haves

• Experience with agentic AI workflows and frameworks (e.g. LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) and applying them to automate complex ML and data engineering tasks
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot to accelerate software development lifecycle and engineering productivity
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation frameworks for large language models in production environments
• Experience with MLOps platforms and modern model lifecycle management tools (e.g. MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI)

Responsibilities

• Define and own the end-to-end architecture of the N&E ML platform across a large problem space spanning ABC News, ABC Entertainment, National Geographic, Marvel, and Disney Studios. Author architecture documents, drive them through review, and oversee implementation to ensure solutions are scalable, reliable, and aligned with platform-wide standards.
• Identify, scope, and prioritize the most impactful and time-sensitive ML workstreams across the N&E portfolio. Break down and sequence complex initiatives, proactively surface risks to leadership, and drive outcomes with a clear metrics-driven mindset.
• Drive the design and evolution of infrastructure supporting the full ML lifecycle across diverse content types and brands: data pipelines, workflow orchestration, feature stores, batch training, and low-latency online serving. Champion reliability, quality, and operational excellence across the platform.
• Stay at the forefront of industry trends in ML, AI, and data engineering. Proactively identify and champion the adoption of new technologies, frameworks, and patterns that drive improvement across the N&E portfolio (e.g. recommendation systems, LLMs, RAGs, object detection, autogenerated content tagging).
• Own and speak to production incidents during weekly meetings with leadership. Hold the team to the right engineering processes and drive a culture of reliability, observability, and continuous improvement across the N&E ML problem space.
• Actively participate in and contribute to the broader Machine Learning community across Disney Entertainment & ESPN. Drive and influence engineering standards, cross-org programs, and best practices that extend beyond the N&E ML team.
• Serve as a thought leader who deeply understands the business objectives and problems across the N&E portfolio - not just the technical ones. Lead metrics-driven programs that connect ML platform investments directly to measurable guest experience and business outcomes across all brands.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, technical rigor, and continuous learning. Be a confident, vocal, and optimistic leader who inspires the team and drives outcomes people want to rally around.

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: Principal
• Education Level: Associate degree