Principal Machine Learning Engineer
The Walt Disney Company2 months ago
Glendale, CA, USA or New York, NY, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$207k - $278k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture of the News & Entertainment ML platform and lead architecture documentation, reviews, and implementation oversight.
- Identify, prioritize, sequence, and drive complex ML workstreams across Disney’s News & Entertainment portfolio.
- Design and evolve infrastructure for data pipelines, workflow orchestration, feature stores, batch training, and low-latency online model serving.
- Advance personalization, recommendation systems, ML infrastructure, and emerging applications involving LLMs, RAG, object detection, and automated content tagging.
- Own production incident participation and drive reliability, observability, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Influence cross-organizational engineering standards, programs, best practices, and architectural governance.
- Connect ML platform investments to measurable guest experience and business outcomes through metrics-driven programs.
- Mentor and elevate senior engineers while fostering technical rigor, ownership, and continuous learning.
- Partner with senior leadership, product teams, and cross-functional stakeholders across Disney Entertainment and ESPN.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, statistics, math, or a comparable field, and/or equivalent work experience.
- 10+ years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments, including ownership of large, complex problem spaces.
- Deep expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, and statistical methods applied to large-scale engineering problems.
- Experience owning architecture across a significant platform or product domain, including architecture documentation, reviews, and implementation leadership.
- Demonstrated success improving ML platform capabilities, personalization quality, or recommendation system performance.
- Experience designing and evolving backend microservices for large-scale distributed systems using REST.
- Strong cloud infrastructure expertise, preferably with AWS and its listed services.
- Hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, Kinesis, and Kafka.
- Experience leading high-priority incident response and reliability programs across a team or platform.
- Experience with cross-organizational engineering communities, standards-setting, architectural governance, and metrics-driven technical leadership.
- Exceptional communication, influence, collaboration, prioritization, and stakeholder management skills, including alignment with senior leadership.
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.
- Preferred: experience with LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, prompt engineering, LLM fine-tuning, LLM evaluation frameworks, MLflow, SageMaker, or Vertex AI.
Benefits
- Full-time employment in Glendale, California, with an alternate listed location at 7 Hudson Square in New York.
- The compensation package may include bonus and/or long-term incentive units in addition to medical, financial, and other benefits.
Tech Stack
Categories
About The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is a diversified entertainment business that produces films and television, operates theme parks and resorts, and runs streaming services including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. It earns revenue from subscriptions and advertising, theatrical distribution, licensing and merchandise, and park admissions and experiences. Founded in 1923 and headquartered in Burbank, California, Disney owns brands such as Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Studios and serves audiences worldwide.