Lead Machine Learning Engineer - ESPN+ Personalization

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.

Job Summary :

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. ESPN is building a new real-time video recommendation system as a core capability of our next-generation streaming platform. We are building a foundational ML team that will power the personalization experience for millions of users. We are seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to take ownership of major components of the end-to-end personalization system. In this role, you will lead the technical design and delivery of key subsystems (modeling, data pipelines, real-time serving, or online experimentation), working closely with the Principal MLE, product, infrastructure, and cross-functional partners. You will combine deep machine learning expertise with strong software engineering skills to drive production-grade ML solutions at scale. In addition, you will provide mentorship to more junior engineers and play a key role in establishing technical standards, development processes, and team culture as the team grows.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of machine learning models for large-scale real-time short-form video recommendation.
• Architect and implement key subsystems of the end-to-end personalization pipeline, including model training, online inference, feature stores, streaming pipelines, and serving infrastructure.
• Build advanced recommendation models using deep learning, embeddings, sequence models, transformers, and multi-task learning frameworks.
• Partner with Principal ML Engineer and technical leadership to drive system architecture decisions balancing scalability, latency, accuracy, and maintainability.
• Conduct deep data analyses on user interactions to identify optimization opportunities and drive continuous model improvements.
• Drive ML experimentation processes, A / B testing, and evaluation frameworks to validate model performance.
• Establish and enforce ML engineering best practices across model development, deployment, monitoring, and governance.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to other ML engineers, contributing to capability building within the team.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, engineers, and infrastructure teams to align technical execution with business goals.

Required Education, Experience / Skills / Training

Basic Qualifications :

Required Education :

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其他資訊 / Disability Accommodation

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