Hybrid Data Engineer, Audio/ML Pipelines

Disney Cruise Line - The Walt Disney Company; California (MO); Hybrid; Confidential; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus potential

Long-term incentive units

Job summary

Disney Cruise Line - The Walt Disney Company is hiring a Data Engineer (Audio/ML) in the Nicasio, CA area to design and optimize data pipelines for AI research on immersive and multichannel audio, including Dolby Atmos and high-order ambisonics.

You will partner with AI/ML researchers, ensure scalable ingestion and preprocessing, and develop automation for labeling, cleaning, and augmentation while coordinating with cloud platforms and containerized workflows.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree (preference for PhD) in Data Engineering/Science, CS, Signal Processing, or related field.
• 8+ years experience in data engineering/science building AI/ML pipelines.
• Proficient Python with Pandas, NumPy, and PyTorch data utilities.
• Hands‑on with audio processing libraries (Librosa, FFmpeg, SoX).
• Familiarity with scalable pipeline tools (GitLab, Spark, Airflow, Luigi) and containerized workflows (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong understanding of data pipelines for training/retraining/evaluation in iterative research.
• Experience with immersive/multichannel audio formats.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (S3, Redshift, BigQuery).
• Proven problem‑solving and proactive data challenges handling.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable data pipelines for ingestion, preprocessing, and transformation of large audio datasets.
• Support AI/ML model training/retraining workflows to enable continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with researchers to define data requirements and feedback loops for pipeline improvements.
• Develop preprocessing techniques for immersive audio formats (Dolby Atmos, Ambisonics).
• Automate data cleaning, normalization, and augmentation for various model architectures.
• Integrate external datasets and APIs while ensuring compliant data usage.
• Monitor and optimize pipeline performance for complex data structures.
• Create tools/workflows for annotation, labeling, and data curation (active learning).
• Perform exploratory data analysis to uncover trends and data gaps.

Skills

Python

Pandas

NumPy

PyTorch data utilities

Librosa

FFmpeg

SoX

Spark

Airflow

Docker

Kubernetes

GitLab

Cloud platforms (AWS S3/Redshift/BigQ)

Model training pipelines

Education

Master’s degree with PhD preferred in Data Engineering/Science or related field

Tools

GitLab

Apache Spark

Airflow

Luigi

Docker

Kubernetes

Tableau

Matplotlib

Job description

Disney Cruise Line - The Walt Disney Company is hiring a Data Engineer (Audio/ML) in the Nicasio, CA area to design and optimize data pipelines for AI research on immersive and multichannel audio, including Dolby Atmos and high-order ambisonics.

You will partner with AI/ML researchers, ensure scalable ingestion and preprocessing, and develop automation for labeling, cleaning, and augmentation while coordinating with cloud platforms and containerized workflows.