The Walt Disney Company

Lead Machine Learning Engineer

The Walt Disney Company

full-time

Posted on:

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

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Salary

💰 $164,500 - $246,400 per year

Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

AWSAzureCloudDistributed SystemsGoogle Cloud PlatformPyTorchTensorflow

About the role

  • Lead the design, development, and deployment of machine learning models for large-scale real-time short-form video recommendation
  • Architect and implement key subsystems of the end-to-end personalization pipeline, including model training, online inference, feature stores, streaming pipelines, and serving infrastructure
  • Build advanced recommendation models using deep learning, embeddings, sequence models, transformers, and multi-task learning frameworks
  • Partner with Principal ML Engineer and technical leadership to drive system architecture decisions balancing scalability, latency, accuracy, and maintainability
  • Conduct deep data analyses on user interactions to identify optimization opportunities and drive continuous model improvements
  • Drive ML experimentation processes, A/B testing, and evaluation frameworks to validate model performance
  • Establish and enforce ML engineering best practices across model development, deployment, monitoring, and governance
  • Mentor and provide technical guidance to other ML engineers, contributing to capability building within the team
  • Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, engineers, and infrastructure teams to align technical execution with business goals

Requirements

  • Demonstrated ownership of end-to-end ML system components with successful production launches
  • Strong applied ML expertise with experience in personalization, recommendation systems, ranking models, and/or predictive modeling
  • Proficiency with modern ML frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar
  • Experience with real-time feature stores, streaming data pipelines, and online inference architectures
  • Strong software engineering skills, with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Excellent communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills, including mentorship experience
  • Experience partnering with cross-functional teams (product, infra, data science) to deliver ML-powered product features
  • Preferred qualification: Experience building real-time recommendation systems for content feeds, media platforms, or short-form video
  • Familiarity with ranking models, retrieval systems, approximate nearest neighbor search (ANN), and embedding management at scale
  • Knowledge of real-time personalization challenges including cold start, feedback loops, delayed labels, and exploration-exploitation tradeoffs
  • Experience with experimentation platforms (A/B tests, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning)
  • Experience operating in startup-like or 0→1 product development environments
  • Ability to identify technical risks, balance tradeoffs, and drive pragmatic solutions under ambiguous product requirements
  • 7+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models into production systems