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Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Job ID 10089750 Location New York, New York, United States / Santa Monica, California, United States / San Francisco, California, United States / Seattle, Washington, United States Business Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology Date posted May 24, 2024
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"I didn't think it was possible that something I did for fun - telling sports stories through stats - could become my job until I came here."

Ana, Sr. Researcher, ESPN

Job Summary:

Overview:

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

  • Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

  • Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.

  • Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

The vision of the Machine Learning (ML) Engineering team at Disney is to drive and enable ML usage across several domains in heterogeneous language environments and at all stages of a project’s life cycle, including ad-hoc exploration, preparing training data, model development, and robust production deployment. The team is invested in continual innovation on the ML infrastructure itself to carefully orchestrate a continuous cycle of learning, inference, and observation while also maintaining systems with availability and reliability. We seek to find new ways to scale with our guest and partner base as well as the ever-growing need for ML and experiments.

Job Summary:

We’re looking for a principal ML engineer interested in building optimized, efficient and reliable products, services and interfaces to federate access to data stores, simplify, automate and manage the ML development and deployment ecosystem. In addition, the ideal candidate would be excited about partnering with various data science, analytic and experimentation teams to gather requirements, seek feedback, and focus on continuous development and improvement of the ML infrastructure.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

  • Drive and architect ML-focused solutions for diverse domains including personalization, search, capacity planning and management, or fraud and abuse prevention.

  • Design and develop tools, services, SDKs to simplify development, deployment and productionization of ML models at scale

  • Experience deploying, maintaining and evaluating production ML models at scale.

  • Collaborate with ML and data practitioners to automate their pipelines.

  • Build tooling and low-latency services to enable and support event-driven pipelines.

  • Defines best practices and standards for writing, building, testing, and deploying ML applications.

  • Work on complex, cross-functional projects that have a broad impact on the business.

  • Maintain a culture of quality, innovation and experimentation

  • Work in an Agile environment that focuses on collaboration and teamwork.

Basic Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of software experience working in large scale, real-time distributed systems.

  • Experienced with cloud technologies in AWS or GCP as well as container systems such as Docker or Kubernetes.

  • Passion for turning ideas into products and improving the member experience.

  • Excellent communication and people engagement skills.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Familiarity with ML pipelines and AWS technologies.

  • Experience with graph-based data workflows such as Apache Airflow, Meson.

  • Mentor colleagues on best practices and technical concepts of building large scale solutions.

Required Education

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.


The hiring range for this position in New York or Seattle is $208,400 to $279,500 per year, in San Francisco is $217,900 to $292,200 per year, and in Los Angeles is $199,000 to $266,800 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

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About Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&E Technology) provides the technological backbone and product development for Disney’s two media business units, while helping to keep the company at the vanguard of innovation – enabling the Company to continuously leverage technology to enhance storytelling and creativity, while delivering scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its businesses.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

This position is with Disney Streaming Technology LLC, which is part of a business we call Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology.

Disney Streaming Technology LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

DISABILITY ACCOMMODATION FOR EMPLOYMENT APPLICATIONS

The Walt Disney Company and its Affiliated Companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, email Candidate.Accommodations@Disney.com with your request. This email address is not for general employment inquiries or correspondence. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.

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Hiring Process

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