Senior Machine Learning Engineer - News

Disney Cruise Line - The Walt Disney Company; New York (NY); On-site; Confidential; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus opportunities

Full range of medical benefits

Financial benefits

Job summary

Disney Cruise Line - The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to shape the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will design and develop infrastructure supporting the ML cycle, mentor engineers, and collaborate across teams to deliver personalized media experiences. The role requires 5+ years of experience in ML engineering, a Bachelor's in a related field, and expertise in cloud infrastructure and data science. The position offers a comprehensive benefits package and salary range of $148,700 - $199,400 per year in New York.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building ML engineering systems in production.
• Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods.
• Experience designing backend microservices for distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Own complex technical initiatives from design to deployment.
• Design and develop infrastructure for the full ML cycle.
• Partner with stakeholders to translate business requirements.

Skills

Machine Learning Engineering

Data Science

Deep Learning Algorithms

Cloud Infrastructure (AWS)

Microservices

Agile Development

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Databricks

Datadog

Spark

AWS Services

Kafka

Job description

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on Disney Entertainment & ESPN’s News ML team, you will shape the technical direction of the News ML Platform, building scalable infrastructure for learning, inference, and monitoring while collaborating across product, data, and engineering teams to deliver personalized media experiences.

Responsibilities

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from technical design through production deployment and operational excellence
• Design and develop infrastructure supporting the full cycle of machine learning, including data pipelines and workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tools, and feature libraries
• Drive data and ML‑driven solutions for diverse engineering use cases such as recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, RAGs
• Partner with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions
• Strategically prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to deliver the highest‑impact and most time‑sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks to ensure successful execution
• Champion engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response
• Mentor and coach engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to technical documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments
• Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods to solve real‑world engineering problems
• Comfortable operating at all levels of the predictive stack, including data collection, data analysis, feature engineering, batch training and low‑latency online serving
• Experience designing and developing backend microservices for large‑scale distributed systems using REST
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize)
• Familiarity with developing and deploying Spark and ML pipelines
• Hands‑on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, Kafka
• Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills, with the ability to inspire and empower a team towards achieving business goals
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring such as Datadog
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments
• Excellent communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast‑paced, guest‑focused environment

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year and in Glendale, CA is $141,900 - $190,300. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and may vary depending on geographic region, knowledge, skills, and experience. A bonus and/or long‑term incentive units may be provided, as well as the full range of medical, financial, and other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.