Lead Machine Learning Engineer - ESPN+ Personalization

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology

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.

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here :

1. Building the future of Disney’s media : Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

2. Reach, Scale & Impact : More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally.

3. Innovation : We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

Job Summary :

ESPN is investing in real-time ML platforms that power next-generation personalization and on-platform decisioning for live and short-form sports experiences. As Lead Machine Learning Engineer, you will own critical pieces of the ML infrastructure and operations stack—from low-latency online inference services and streaming feature platforms to model deployment, observability, and reliability practices. You’ll partner closely with the Principal MLE, platform / SRE, data, and product teams to design for scale, latency, cost, and resilience, ensuring our ML services meet production SLOs for millions of users. You will set technical standards, establish MLOps best practices, mentor engineers, and help evolve our real-time experimentation and safety / governance frameworks

Responsibilities and Duties of the Role :

1) Real-Time ML Platform Architecture & Services

• Architect, build, and operate low-latency online inference services (e.g., GPU / CPU serving, autoscaling, request routing, canary / shadow, blue-green).
• Design multi-region, highly available ML services with graceful degradation, back-pressure, and circuit-breaking.
• Lead capacity planning and cost management for high-QPS workloads.

2) MLOps, Reliability & Observability

3) Data & Feature Platform for Streaming ML

4) Experimentation & Online Evaluation

5) Modeling Enablement & Technical Leadership

Required Education, Experience / Skills / Training :

Basic Qualifications :

Preferred qualifications :

Experience with :

Required Education :

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY & Seattle, WA is $172,300-$231,100 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $183,700.00-$246,400.00 per year and in Los Angeles, CA is $164,500.00 to $220,600.00 per year. 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.

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