Sr Machine Learning Engineer

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join the News ML team in New York, NY. In this role, you will help build dependable data pipelines and advanced ML platforms that support real-time personalized news experiences across web, mobile, and connected TV.

You will lead the technical direction for the News ML Platform, spanning scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, while partnering with cross-functional teams to translate needs into production-ready solutions.

What you’ll do

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, covering technical design, production deployment, and operational excellence.
• Design and build ML infrastructure across the full lifecycle, including data pipelines, workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tooling, and feature libraries.
• Deliver data and ML-driven solutions for engineering use cases including recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging, and RAGs.
• Collaborate with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to convert business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to achieve the highest-impact and most time-sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks.
• Promote engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor and coach engineers, supporting a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Contribute to technical documentation and support knowledge sharing across teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or a comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments.
• Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods used to solve real-world engineering problems.
• Ability to work across the predictive stack, including data collection, data analysis, feature engineering, batch training, and low-latency online serving.
• Experience designing and developing backend microservices for large-scale distributed systems using REST.
• Cloud infrastructure experience, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize).
• Familiarity with developing and deploying Spark and ML pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, and Kafka.
• Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills to inspire and empower a team toward business goals.
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring, such as Datadog.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments.
• Excellent communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment.

Technologies

• REST, AWS, Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize
• Spark, Databricks, Kinesis, Kafka
• Datadog, CI/CD
• RAGs, object detection, recommendation systems

Compensation and benefits

• Annual salary range: USD 148,700 - 199,400.
• A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package.
• Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.