Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer

The Walt Disney Company

full-time

Posted on: 9/24/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States • California, New York, Washington

✨ AI Apply

💰 $234,400 - $314,300 per year

Senior

AWSCloudPythonPyTorchTensorflow

About the role

Define and drive the long-term technical vision for personalization and recommendation systems across Disney+, Hulu, ABC, and ESPN
Lead the development of foundational machine learning architectures and algorithms enabling scalable, real-time, and highly personalized user experiences for hundreds of millions of users
Serve as a cross-functional thought leader, partnering with senior executives in Product, Engineering, Data, and Design to influence company-wide personalization strategy and investment
Identify and drive high-impact initiatives that advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning, guiding efforts from concept through deployment with measurable business outcomes
Mentor and elevate technical leaders across teams, fostering a culture of innovation, rigor, and excellence in machine learning engineering
Set standards for experimentation, model evaluation, and algorithm fairness; establish frameworks and tools to accelerate development and promote reproducibility
Represent Disney Streaming’s personalization efforts in strategic forums, internal councils, and external technical communities (e.g., conferences, publications, industry panels)

12+ years of relevant experience
Track recordings of research & publications in recommendation system domain with deep neural net algorithms
Strong proficiency in at least one of the following deep learning frameworks: tensorflow, pytorch
Experiences building and deploying full stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment
Track record from design to full production of effective recommendation systems
Experience with cloud services in a production environment (particularly AWS)
Understanding of statistical concepts (e.g., hypothesis testing, regression analysis)
Ability to articulate the usage and behavior of models and algorithms to both technical and non-technical audiences
Master’s or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field (preferred)
Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale and familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance (preferred)
Deep understanding in personalization challenges in homepage experience and proven records of developing effective solutions (preferred)
12+ years of experience in developing highly scalable machine learning products (preferred)
12+ years writing production-level, scalable Python code (preferred)
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience (required)