Lead ML Engineer: Real-Time News Personalization

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

Job summary

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to shape the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will drive scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, explore data deeply, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to deliver personalized guest experiences.

You will guide algorithmic innovation roadmaps, ensure scalable and impactful solutions, and align work with stakeholder needs in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience with scalable systems.
• 5+ years building and deploying ML systems in production environments.
• Strong knowledge of data science, DL algorithms, and statistical methods.
• Experience with REST microservices and cloud infrastructure (AWS).

Responsibilities

• Own complex ML initiatives end-to-end from design to production deployment.
• Build infrastructure for ML data pipelines, orchestration, and feature libraries.
• Develop ML solutions for recommendations, detection, tagging, and RAGs.
• Collaborate with product, editorial, and engineering teams to translate requirements.
• Prioritize workstreams, manage risks, and ensure timely delivery.
• Promote code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of ownership and collaboration.
• Contribute documentation and share knowledge across teams.

Skills

7+ years software engineering

5+ years ML systems in production

Data science / deep learning

REST backend microservices

AWS cloud infrastructure

Spark / Databricks

Kinesis / Kafka

Datadog / observability

Agile / Scrum

Excellent communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

AWS

Lambda

Step Functions

Glue

SQS

SNS

Personalize

Spark

Databricks

Kinesis

Kafka

REST

Datadog

Job description

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to shape the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will drive scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, explore data deeply, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to deliver personalized guest experiences.

You will guide algorithmic innovation roadmaps, ensure scalable and impactful solutions, and align work with stakeholder needs in a fast-paced environment.