Lead Data Engineer, Audio Datasets & ML Pipelines

The Walt Disney Company; California; Hybrid; USD 173,000 - 232,000; Full time

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company’s Skywalker Sound is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead the end-to-end strategy, creation, and management of audio content datasets for AI/ML research.

Based in the Bay Area, you will build scalable pipelines and balance datasets to optimize model performance for immersive, multichannel audio; onsite at Nicasio with occasional remote work. You’ll collaborate with researchers and engineers to enable cutting-edge soundtrack workflows across global media production.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or higher in data engineering/science, CS, or related field.
• 8+ years of data engineering/data science experience with audio/media content.
• Strong Python and data manipulation skills (Pandas, NumPy).
• Experience with audio processing libraries and formats.

Responsibilities

• Lead creation, curation, and management of high-volume audio datasets for AI/ML training and evaluation.
• Design scalable pipelines for ingestion, preprocessing, and transformation of audio content.
• Balance datasets relative to model performance and mitigate bias.
• Develop preprocessing techniques for immersive audio formats (Dolby Atmos, multichannel).
• Automate data cleaning, normalization, and augmentation for various model architectures.
• Integrate external datasets and APIs with data usage compliance.
• Monitor pipeline performance and optimize data structures.
• Create tools/workflows for annotating and labeling datasets, including active learning.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis and dataset audits to ensure coverage and quality.

Skills

Python proficiency

Data manipulation with Pandas & NumPy

ML dataset management

Problem solving

Education

Master's Degree or higher in Data Engineering/Science, CS, Signal Processing, or related field

Tools

Librosa

FFmpeg

SoX

GitLab

Apache Spark

Airflow

Luigi

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS S3

Redshift

Google BigQuery

Job description

The Walt Disney Company’s Skywalker Sound is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead the end-to-end strategy, creation, and management of audio content datasets for AI/ML research.

Based in the Bay Area, you will build scalable pipelines and balance datasets to optimize model performance for immersive, multichannel audio; onsite at Nicasio with occasional remote work. You’ll collaborate with researchers and engineers to enable cutting-edge soundtrack workflows across global media production.