Principal Machine Learning Engineer
The Walt Disney Company17 days 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
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