Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Personalization

Join a team shaping the future of Disney Streaming experiences. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology offers the opportunity to influence personalization for Disney+ and Hulu, with an individual contributor role focused on advancing recommendation algorithms from research to production. You will collaborate across Engineering, Product, and Data groups to deliver scalable, impact-driven results. This onsite role is based in New York, NY, with a salary range of USD 148,700 to 199,400 per year.

Benefits

• Medical benefits
• Financial benefits
• Bonus and/or long-term incentive units

Compensation

Salary: USD 148,700 - 199,400 per year

Location and Schedule

Role is on-site in New York, NY, requiring four days in-person at the designated office location.

Responsibilities

• Algorithm development and maintenance: Apply cutting edge machine learning methods to personalization and recommendation systems; maintain deployed algorithms and articulate methodologies to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Feature engineering and optimization: Build and maintain ETL pipelines with orchestration tools such as Airflow and Jenkins; deploy scalable streaming and batch data pipelines to support petabyte-scale datasets.
• Development best practices: Establish and maintain standards for algorithm development, testing, and deployment.
• Collaborate with product and business stakeholders: Identify new personalization opportunities and partner with data teams to improve data collection, experimentation, and analysis.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience developing machine learning models, performing large-scale data analysis, and/or data engineering.
• 5+ years writing production-level, scalable code in Python and SQL.
• 3+ years of experience developing algorithms for deployment to production systems.
• In-depth understanding of modern machine learning methods, models, and their mathematical foundations, including deep learning where applicable.
• Experience deploying and maintaining pipelines and engineering big-data solutions using technologies like Databricks, S3, and Spark.
• Ability to gauge the complexity of machine learning problems and apply simple, effective approaches when appropriate.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field.
• Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale.
• Experience building and deploying full-stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment.
• Familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and data governance principles.
• Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases.
• AWS
• Databricks
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, or related quantitative field

Technologies

• Python
• SQL
• Airflow
• Jenkins
• Databricks
• S3
• Spark
• AWS

Why you might love working here

• Building the future of Disney’s media through innovative technology that powers our data platforms, advertising, and distribution strategies.
• Reach, scale, and impact: Disney’s tech and products connect fans with beloved brands and stories across Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, ABC, ABC News, and more to a global audience.
• Innovation: The team develops groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and tackle distinctive technical challenges.