Principal ML Engineer: Personalization & Platform Leader

Disney Entertainment; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 211,000 - 282,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to own the N&E ML Platform architecture and drive step-function improvements in personalization and ML infrastructure. You will partner with senior leaders, product, and cross-org teams to set the standard for ML excellence across Disney’s News & Entertainment portfolio.

You will lead the design of data pipelines, feature stores, and online serving, while guiding incident response, reliability

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience in a related field.
• 10+ years building and operating ML engineering systems in production.
• Expertise in data science, deep learning, and statistics for large-scale problems.
• Experience owning architecture across a major platform or product domain.
• Proven ability to drive measurable ML platform improvements and personalization quality.
• Backend microservices design experience at scale using REST.
• Strong cloud and big data technology experience (AWS, Databricks, Spark).
• Experience leading incident response and reliability programs.
• Active cross-organizational collaboration and governance experience.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management in Agile settings.

Responsibilities

• Define and own end-to-end architecture of the N&E ML platform.
• Prioritize ML workstreams and drive cross-org initiatives.
• Design and evolve ML lifecycle infrastructure across content types and brands.
• Identify and adopt new technologies to improve ML systems and personalization.
• Own production incidents and drive reliability and observability improvements.
• Mentor senior engineers and align ML work with business outcomes.
• Collaborate with leadership and product teams to set ML strategy.

Skills

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Statistics/Mat

10+ years ML engineering experience

Deep learning algorithms

Architecture ownership

Metrics-driven leadership

REST backend design

Cloud infrastructure (AWS)

Big data tech (Databricks, Spark)

Incident response & reliability

Agile/Scrum collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or comparable field

Tools

AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize)

Databricks

Spark

Kinesis

Kafka

REST

MLflow / SageMaker / Vertex AI

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to own the N&E ML Platform architecture and drive step-function improvements in personalization and ML infrastructure. You will partner with senior leaders, product, and cross-org teams to set the standard for ML excellence across Disney’s News & Entertainment portfolio.

You will lead the design of data pipelines, feature stores, and online serving, while guiding incident response, reliability