Senior Manager, Machine Learning

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

• Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

• Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally. 

• Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Ad Platforms Machine Learning

Ad Platform builds Disney’s industry-leading advertising technology, supporting sports, news, and entertainment content across all major media platforms. Our systems handle high-scale, high-throughput, revenue-critical workloads.

Our mission is to advance machine learning capabilities across Ad Platform by delivering scalable, high impact ML and data science solutions that enhance various aspects of ad serving. We are seeking a Sr Manager, Machine Learning to join this innovative team. This role offers a unique leadership opportunity for an experienced ML and people leader who thrives at the intersection of technical excellence, strategic impact, and cross-functional collaboration.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position, ideal for leaders who enjoy staying close to architecture, design, and machine learning models—while managing engineers and managers; and building strong engineering organizations. You will apply your battle-tested experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems including Machine Learning and AI technologies, and leadership skills to unblock and guide our ML and data science team members. You’ll guide teams to design and build scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines in various domains using industry best practices which are aligned in close collaboration with the ML team in the US highlighting cross-functional collaboration. You’ll work with product teams to translate requirements into well-defined technical implementations, as well as define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.

What You’ll Do

• Hire and Lead Team: Lead, mentor and guide Data Scientists, Machine Learning and AI engineers to build solutions adhering to industry best practices and deliver scalable solutions including model architecture and algorithm selection

• Lead and deliver complex, high-impact projects: Lead by example and always strive to improve the design for more scalable, cleaner, and decoupled implementations. Oversee end-2-end machine learning workflow, including data collection, model development, deployment and modeling. These are expected to be aligned with the larger platform strategy and tools in collaboration with the US teams to stay consistent across Ad Platforms

• Improve productivity: Drive adoption of best practices in model development, code quality, testing, and documentation

• Embrace next-gen technology: Solid understanding and usage of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy. Define strategic direction for machine learning projects and collaborate with product and engineering stakeholders

• Global Collaboration & Alignment: Serve as technical leader and partner with leaders across engineering, data, and operations worldwide; across time-zones; Communicate strategies, progress, and results to leadership and cross-functional teams. Develop partnerships across the organization to identify and prioritize high-impact ML opportunities

• Innovate for customers: Foster innovation by exploring new ML techniques, tools, and technologies

• Technical and Operational Excellence: Available for On-Call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule for ML/AI solutions

• Responsible usage of AI: Ensure responsible AI practices, including fairness, explainability, and compliance with privacy and ethical standards

What makes this role unique

• Global impact from India: You’ll be part of Disney India innovation hub and work with talented builders creating impact on customers across geography. You will lead platforms that power global products like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and ABC—used by millions of people worldwide

• Strong ownership: Disney India is a core engineering hub. Ad Platform leaders have complete ownership and autonomy of architecture, delivery, and people development

• Leadership Development: Build and mentor senior engineers and managers, shaping the future of Disney’s engineering leadership in India

• Work-Life Harmony: Disney India values work-life harmony. We provide flexibility as part of work culture, including flexible workdays and hours

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience, with at least 3 years in a people-management or technical leadership role

• Proven ability to translate business problems into scalable ML and GenAI solutions and strong understanding of machine learning fundamentals, deep learning, and statistical modeling

• Proven experience designing, building, and deploying scalable machine learning models and systems in production

• Experience deploying ML/GenAI systems at scale using cloud platforms and MLOps practices

• Advanced programming proficiency (e.g., Python, Java, or similar); experience with ML/DL frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face)

• Experience building, fine-tuning, evaluating, and deploying LLM-based systems (e.g., RAG, prompt engineering, model optimization)

• Demonstrated ability to lead global teams and collaborate across organizational boundaries

Preferred Qualifications

• Domain knowledge in the Ad Tech industry

• Experience working with large-scale data and distributed systems.

• Knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and MLOps pipelines.

• Track record of innovation and contributions to the ML/AI community (publications, talks, open source)

• Demonstrated success in cross-functional leadership within large, global, or matrixed organizations

• Strong curiosity and alignment with Disney’s mission, with a passion for delivering innovative, resilient, and developer-friendly platforms