Senior ML Engineer — Real-Time Recommender Systems

Disney Entertainment; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 193,000; Full time

Job summary

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design, develop, and productionize deep learning models for large-scale recommendation systems.

This is a model-focused role owning architecture, training, evaluation, inference optimization, and online serving, with collaboration across platform and infrastructure teams to deliver production-grade solutions for ESPN apps.

Qualifications

• Strong theoretical and applied knowledge of deep learning, optimization, and modern neural networks.
• Experience designing and launching deep learning models in production.
• Hands-on experience with recommendation, ranking, retrieval, or personalization models at scale.
• Proficient in PyTorch or TensorFlow with strong Python software engineering skills.
• Experience optimizing inference performance and understanding latency, throughput, memory, and cost.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of advanced deep learning models for retrieval, ranking, and personalization.
• Translate objectives into model formulations, loss functions, and evaluation plans.
• Develop production-grade training and inference code with strong correctness and maintainability.
• Optimize models for online performance including latency and memory efficiency.
• Own the model productionization path from prototype to online deployment.
• Design offline experiments and partner to validate business impact via online tests.
• Diagnose model behavior including bias and distribution shift.
• Collaborate with MLOps, platform, data teams on interfaces and observability.
• Mentor engineers on deep learning and production-grade development.

Skills

Deep learning

Recommendation systems

Python

PyTorch/TensorFlow

Productionizing models

Latency optimization

MLOps collaboration

Model evaluation

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s or Master in CS/ML/DS

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ONNX

TensorRT

CUDA

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design, develop, and productionize deep learning models for large-scale recommendation systems.

This is a model-focused role owning architecture, training, evaluation, inference optimization, and online serving, with collaboration across platform and infrastructure teams to deliver production-grade solutions for ESPN apps.