Principal ML Engineer — Architect of Scalable Personalization

The Walt Disney Company; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 278,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to own the architecture and strategic direction of the N&E ML Platform across a large, complex problem space. You will drive step-function improvements in personalization, recommendations, and ML infrastructure, partnering with senior leadership and cross-org teams to set the standard for ML excellence.

You will mentor engineers, drive reliability, and align ML initiatives with business outcomes

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, statistics, math, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments.
• Deep expertise in data science, deep learning, and statistical methods for large-scale problems.
• Experience owning architecture across a major platform or product domain, including architecture documents and reviews.
• Proven ability to drive quantifiable ML platform improvements and personalized experiences.
• Experience designing and evolving backend microservices using REST.
• Strong cloud infrastructure expertise, especially AWS.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, Kinesis, and Kafka.
• Proven incident response leadership and reliability programs.
• Active participation in cross-organizational engineering standards and governance.
• Metrics-driven leadership linking engineering decisions to business outcomes.
• Excellent communication and collaboration with senior leadership and stakeholders.
• Experience in Agile/Scrum with strong prioritization and stakeholder management.

Responsibilities

• Define and own end-to-end architecture of the N&E ML platform across a large problem space.
• Identify, scope, and prioritize impactful ML workstreams across the portfolio.
• Drive the design and evolution of ML infrastructure for data pipelines, orchestration, feature stores, and online serving.
• Stay at the forefront of ML trends and advocate adoption of new technologies.
• Own production incident response and drive reliability improvements.
• Engage with cross-organizational communities to set standards and governance.
• Lead metrics-driven programs connecting ML investments to business outcomes.
• Mentor senior engineers and foster ownership and rigor.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Databricks

Spark

Kinesis

Kafka

MLflow

SageMaker

Vertex AI

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to own the architecture and strategic direction of the N&E ML Platform across a large, complex problem space. You will drive step-function improvements in personalization, recommendations, and ML infrastructure, partnering with senior leadership and cross-org teams to set the standard for ML excellence.

You will mentor engineers, drive reliability, and align ML initiatives with business outcomes