Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Principal Machine Learning Engineer

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.

Our team is seeking a principal machine learning engineer who will be an outstanding addition and leading development for prediction or optimization engines for addressable ad platforms. The right person for this role should be experienced in crafting implementation for either machine learning technologies or data-driven algorithms. If you are someone who is proactive, inquisitive, and innovative in these domains, this is a phenomenal role for you

As our team's Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you will apply your battle-tested experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems including Machine Learning and AI technologies, and leadership skills to unblock and guide our ML, Research and functional teams to create scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines.

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:

• Apply state of the art AI/ML to the Innovation and Creative Platforms for Ad Experiences.
• Leverage novel backend and/or ML/AI solutions for complex ad serving challenges with fast turnaround.
• Drive design and implementation of LLM and GenAI related applications ensuring scalable and efficient approaches for large scale data analysis and model development.
• Provide Prompt Engineering support to different functional team
• Identify and experiment models from training, testing, production rollout to continuous optimization. Lead the ad algorithm architecture design and iterations for models
• Collaborate with engineering teams, product managers, and program managers in an open and creative environment to design, implement and productionalize solutions.
• Mentor team members and support their technical growth.
• Leverage observability tools to provide visibility into performance of AI/ML and other backend solutions
• Support oncall activities on a rotational basis

Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent experience
• At least 10 years of working experience on large scale machine learning
• Strong knowledge of and experience implementing AI/ML technologies and applying mathematical and statistical concepts.
• Proficient in Java, Python, Scala, large scale ML/DL platforms and processing tech stack.
• Ability to collaborate with and lead projects across cross-functional teams such as Product Management, Architecture, and other Engineering teams
• Passionate about understanding the ad business, applying advanced research to relevant business scenarios, and seeking innovation opportunities to enhance business effectiveness.
• Passionate about technology, open to interdisciplinary collaborations, and experienced in building data-driven services and applications.
• A proven track record of thriving in a fast-paced, data-driven, and collaborative work environment is required.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in large scale machine learning using tools such as scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, pytorch
• Experience with LLM-based application development, using LLM-as-a-service providers such as AWS Bedrock, Azure Cognitive Services, or Google's Vertex AI
• Experience using frameworks such as LangGraph, Crew AI, and strands sdk for developing agents
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation
• Experience with best practices in agentic development such as LLM guardrails, tool calling, and consistent APIs such as MCP and A2A
• Experience with designing and implementing agentic architectures in multiple modalities such as text, image, video, and audio.
• Experience in the advertising, digital video advertising, or digital marketing domain

Required Education:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems or related equivalent experience.

Preferred Education:

• Master's degree or PhD in computer science, Information Systems or related equivalent experience.