Senior ML Engineer - Search & Ranking (Streaming)

The Walt Disney Company; Santa Monica (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 lead search algorithm research, development, and productionization for Disney's streaming platforms. You will identify opportunities to advance search quality and work with cross-functional teams to deploy reliable ML systems at scale.

You will collaborate with Product, Data Analytics, and Software Engineers to design scalable ML pipelines, monitor performance, and ensure production readiness of

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience developing and deploying machine learning models in production environments.
• Production-quality Python; strong working knowledge of SQL.
• Experience building or operating search ranking, recommendation, or similar retrieval systems at scale.
• Experience deploying and operating ML systems in cloud environments (AWS); comfort with distributed data processing at scale (e.g., Spark) and production observability practices.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the ongoing development of the team's search ranking system: iterating on model architecture, feature selection, training signal design, and integration of user context signals to improve ranking quality across personalized and nonpersonalized traffic.
• Evaluate model performance against offline and online metrics. Collaborate on hypothesis formulation, experimental design, and the implementation of A/B tests.
• Maintain production search ranking systems and serve as the technical point of contact in collaboration with Product and Data Analytics.
• Work with Data Engineers on feature engineering workflows that produce the training data and behavioral signals that feed search ranking models
• Build and operate ML inference systems for search ranking, meeting the latency and availability requirements of production search.
• Own training pipeline code and model deployment workflows for your models end-to-end, from training data through artifact deployment, using the team's Databricks-based infrastructure.
• Instrument production search ML systems with metrics, logging, and alerting; participate in on-call rotation for search ML components.

Skills

Python

SQL

Machine Learning

Search ranking systems

AWS

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

Spark

Databricks

AWS

Job description

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead search algorithm research, development, and productionization for Disney's streaming platforms. You will identify opportunities to advance search quality and work with cross-functional teams to deploy reliable ML systems at scale.

You will collaborate with Product, Data Analytics, and Software Engineers to design scalable ML pipelines, monitor performance, and ensure production readiness of