Lead ML Engineer — News Personalization

The Walt Disney Company; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 142,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology’s News ML team builds robust data pipelines and ML platforms delivering personalized experiences to ABC News, Good Morning America, and local stations. You’ll shape the technical direction of the News ML Platform, drive scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, and collaborate across product, data and engineering to power engaging content.

You will own end-to-end initiatives from design to deployment, mentor engineers, promote best practices, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, statistics, math, or comparable field of study.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years deploying ML systems in production.
• Expertise in data science, deep learning, or statistical methods.
• Experience with RESTful backend microservices.
• Cloud infrastructure experience, preferably AWS.
• Familiarity with Spark and ML pipelines.
• Experience with Databricks, Kinesis, Kafka.
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills.
• Experience with Datadog and observability.

Responsibilities

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end from design to production deployment.
• Design and develop ML infrastructure, data pipelines, and feature libraries.
• Drive ML-driven solutions for diverse use cases (recommendations, object detection, tagging, RAGs).
• Partner with product, editorial, and engineering to translate business requirements into robust solutions.
• Prioritize initiatives and manage risks to ensure delivery.
• Champion coding standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers and foster ownership and collaboration.
• Contribute to technical documentation and knowledge sharing across teams.

Skills

Software engineering

Machine learning systems

Data science / ML

REST microservices

Cloud AWS

Spark / ML pipelines

Big data

Databricks

Kinesis / Kafka

Observability (Datadog)

Agile/Scrum

Leadership / mentoring

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IS/Statistics/Math

Tools

Databricks

Kinesis

Kafka

AWS

Spark

REST

Datadog

Job description

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology’s News ML team builds robust data pipelines and ML platforms delivering personalized experiences to ABC News, Good Morning America, and local stations. You’ll shape the technical direction of the News ML Platform, drive scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, and collaborate across product, data and engineering to power engaging content.

You will own end-to-end initiatives from design to deployment, mentor engineers, promote best practices, and