Lead Machine Learning Engineer - News

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to strengthen the News ML team in Glendale, CA. This onsite role focuses on shaping the technical direction and delivering scalable, end-to-end machine learning systems that support personalized real-time news experiences across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms.

In this position, you will take ownership of complex technical initiatives from technical design through production deployment, with an emphasis on operational excellence. You will build the infrastructure and workflows that power the full machine learning lifecycle, while partnering closely with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business needs into reliable technical solutions.

What You’ll Do

• Lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end, covering technical design, production deployment, and operational excellence
• Design and develop machine learning infrastructure, including data pipelines and workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tools, and feature libraries
• Deliver data and ML-driven solutions across engineering use cases such as recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, and RAGs
• Collaborate with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to convert business requirements into robust technical implementations
• Set priorities across initiatives and technical workstreams to achieve high-impact, time-sensitive outcomes while identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks
• Promote engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response
• Mentor and coach engineers to support ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to technical documentation and support knowledge sharing across teams

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or a comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years of hands-on experience developing and deploying machine learning systems in production
• Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods for real-world engineering problems
• Comfort 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, including Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, and 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 with the ability 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

Role Details

• Location: Glendale, CA (onsite)
• Compensation: USD 141,900 - 190,300 per year
• Experience level: 7+ years

Technology Stack

• AWS, Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize
• REST, Spark, Databricks
• Kinesis, Kafka
• Datadog