Senior Machine Learning Engineer - News

Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 148,700 - 199,400

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution in New York City seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the News ML Platform. You will design scalable ML infrastructure, build data pipelines, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to deliver personalized content experiences.

Qualifications include 5+ years in ML engineering, expertise in backend microservices, cloud AWS, Spark, and big data tools. This is a full-time on-site role based in New York.

Qualifications

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.

Responsibilities

Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design to production deployment and operational excellence.
Design and develop infrastructure supporting ML data pipelines and feature libraries.
Drive data and ML-driven solutions for recommendations, detection, tagging, and RAGs.

Skills

ML engineering

AWS

REST microservices

Databricks

Kinesis

Kafka

Datadog

Agile/Scrum

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

Databricks

Kinesis

Kafka

Spark

REST APIs

Job description

Senior Machine Learning Engineer - News

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more — all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.

Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.

The News ML team is responsible for building robust data pipelines and advanced machine learning platforms that deliver personalized experiences to users across ABC News, Good Morning America, and local news stations. Our services leverage machine learning models to enable real-time content personalization and targeted distribution across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms, ensuring that users receive the most relevant and engaging news content tailored to their interests. Our mission is to drive seamless, resilient, and low-latency personalized content delivery at scale, while continuously advancing our ML infrastructure and recommendation algorithms.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a leading role in shaping the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will drive infrastructure for scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, conduct in-depth data exploration and analysis, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to power exceptional, personalized guest experiences. Your work will directly support strategic initiatives to help shape the roadmap for algorithmic innovation while ensuring that solutions are scalable, impactful, and aligned with stakeholder needs.

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 also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.