Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology
Glendale, California
Role Location: This is an on-site role requiring 4 days in-person at designated office location. 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: 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. 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. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 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. Job Summary: Our team designs and builds models that directly shape the user experience - powering personalization and engagement across our Disney Streaming's suite of streaming video apps, notably Disney+ and Hulu. With a strong product mindset and a focus on usability, we ensure every ML-driven product enhances how users discover, interact, and enjoy our experiences. As a member of this team you will collaborate across Engineering, Product, and Data teams to apply machine learning methods to meet strategic product personalization goals, explore innovative, cutting edge techniques that can be applied to recommendations, and constantly seek ways to optimize operational processes. This is an Individual Contributor role. You will be expected to lead recommendation and personalization algorithm research, development, and productionization for product areas, and to coordinate requirements and manage stakeholder expectations with Product, Engineering, and Editorial teams. As an IC, you will also be responsible for helping to set the roadmap for algorithmic work - not only for how to approach product requests for new recommendation features, but for helping to drive larger company objectives in the areas of personalization and recommendations. Responsibilities and Duties of the Role: Algorithm Development and Maintenance: Utilize cutting edge machine learning methods to develop algorithms for personalization, recommendation, and other predictive systems; maintain algorithms deployed to production and be the point person in explaining methodologies to technical and non-technical teams Feature Engineering and Optimization: Develop and maintain ETL pipelines using orchestration tools such as Airflow and Jenkins; deploy scalable streaming and batch data pipelines to support petabyte scale datasets Development Best Practices: Maintain existing and establish new algorithm development, testing, and deployment standards Collaborate with product and business stakeholders: Identify and define new personalization opportunities and work with other data teams to improve how we do data collection, experimentation and analysis Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training: Basic Qualifications 5+ years of experience developing machine learning models, performing large-scale data analysis, and/or data engineering experience 5+ years writing production-level, scalable code (Python, SQL) 3+ years of experience developing algorithms for deployment to production systems In-depth understanding of modern machine learning (e.g. deep learning methods), models, and their mathematical underpinnings Experience deploying and maintaining pipelines and in engineering big-data solutions using technologies like Databricks, S3, and Spark Ability to gauge the complexity of machine learning problems and a willingness to execute simple approaches for quick, effective solutions as appropriate Strong written and verbal communication skills Preferred Qualifications MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale Experience building and deploying full stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment Familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases Experience with: AWS, Databricks Required Education Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, or related quantitative field The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year and in Santa Monica, CA is $141,900 - $190,300. 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.
07/30/2026
Full time
Role Location: This is an on-site role requiring 4 days in-person at designated office location. 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: 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. 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. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 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. Job Summary: Our team designs and builds models that directly shape the user experience - powering personalization and engagement across our Disney Streaming's suite of streaming video apps, notably Disney+ and Hulu. With a strong product mindset and a focus on usability, we ensure every ML-driven product enhances how users discover, interact, and enjoy our experiences. As a member of this team you will collaborate across Engineering, Product, and Data teams to apply machine learning methods to meet strategic product personalization goals, explore innovative, cutting edge techniques that can be applied to recommendations, and constantly seek ways to optimize operational processes. This is an Individual Contributor role. You will be expected to lead recommendation and personalization algorithm research, development, and productionization for product areas, and to coordinate requirements and manage stakeholder expectations with Product, Engineering, and Editorial teams. As an IC, you will also be responsible for helping to set the roadmap for algorithmic work - not only for how to approach product requests for new recommendation features, but for helping to drive larger company objectives in the areas of personalization and recommendations. Responsibilities and Duties of the Role: Algorithm Development and Maintenance: Utilize cutting edge machine learning methods to develop algorithms for personalization, recommendation, and other predictive systems; maintain algorithms deployed to production and be the point person in explaining methodologies to technical and non-technical teams Feature Engineering and Optimization: Develop and maintain ETL pipelines using orchestration tools such as Airflow and Jenkins; deploy scalable streaming and batch data pipelines to support petabyte scale datasets Development Best Practices: Maintain existing and establish new algorithm development, testing, and deployment standards Collaborate with product and business stakeholders: Identify and define new personalization opportunities and work with other data teams to improve how we do data collection, experimentation and analysis Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training: Basic Qualifications 5+ years of experience developing machine learning models, performing large-scale data analysis, and/or data engineering experience 5+ years writing production-level, scalable code (Python, SQL) 3+ years of experience developing algorithms for deployment to production systems In-depth understanding of modern machine learning (e.g. deep learning methods), models, and their mathematical underpinnings Experience deploying and maintaining pipelines and in engineering big-data solutions using technologies like Databricks, S3, and Spark Ability to gauge the complexity of machine learning problems and a willingness to execute simple approaches for quick, effective solutions as appropriate Strong written and verbal communication skills Preferred Qualifications MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale Experience building and deploying full stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment Familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases Experience with: AWS, Databricks Required Education Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, or related quantitative field The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year and in Santa Monica, CA is $141,900 - $190,300. 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.
Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology
Glendale, California
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: 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. 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. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 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. The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming's distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly. Job Summary: As a Senior Software Engineer (P3), you will lead the design and implementation of intelligent, AI-driven systems that safeguard the reliability and performance of Disney's global streaming ecosystem. You will be a technical leader in developing agentic systems, complex machine learning models, and high-throughput real-time pipelines that transform massive telemetry and log datasets into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive insights. In this role, you will own the architectural vision for autonomous agents capable of reasoning over complex system behaviors across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. You will act as a bridge between engineering, product, and platform teams, translating high-level business needs into scalable AI solutions that reduce operational overhead. As a P3 engineer, you are expected to deliver mission-critical features, mentor junior engineers, and drive engineering excellence through rigorous design reviews and high-quality, production-ready code in a fast-paced, AI-native environment. Responsibilities and Duties of the Role: Own the design and operation of production-grade, intelligent systems leveraging real-time signals and AI-driven detection to ensure the health of critical services and premium customer experiences. Lead the development of agentic AI systems powered by modern foundation models (e.g., Claude Opus/Sonnet, GPT-4). You will define the strategy for automated reasoning, decisioning, and predictive modeling for global-scale system reliability. Oversee the creation of end-to-end data pipelines that process high-volume telemetry and user signals into actionable, automated insights and root cause analysis. Design and maintain scalable APIs and microservices that provide explainability and predictive signals to cross-functional engineering and product stakeholders. Partner with leadership and cross-functional teams to embed intelligence into global workflows (incident response, release validation), significantly reducing Time-to-Detect (TTD) and Time-to-Resolve (TTR). Promote engineering best practices, provide technical guidance through code and design reviews, and drive innovation in observability and developer productivity through applied AI. Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training: Basic Qualifications 5+ years of applicable experience in backend development, with a proven track record of building and scaling AI-powered or data-driven applications. Advanced proficiency with modern models (GPT-4/o1, Claude Opus/Sonnet, Bedrock), including deep experience in prompt engineering, model evaluation, and building complex agentic workflows using frameworks like LangChain or LangGraph. Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience deploying and monitoring ML systems (PyTorch/TensorFlow) and large-scale data processing (PySpark, Pandas) in production environments. Strong experience with AWS ecosystem and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) at scale. Proven ability to lead technical projects, mentor junior talent, and champion software development best practices (Git, CI/CD, Agile). Expert level use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude) to accelerate team velocity and maintain high code quality. Exceptional communication skills with the ability to navigate ambiguity and explain complex AI/technical concepts to both technical and non-technical partners. Preferred Qualifications Experience implementing observability and monitoring systems for high-volume, low-latency production environments. Experience with modern databases and observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, Conviva, MongoDB) handling billions of events. Advanced knowledge of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design patterns. Education Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience The hiring range for this position in New York City, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year, and in Glendale, CA is $141,900 - $190,300 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.
07/30/2026
Full time
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: 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. 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. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 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. The Observability & Insights group ensures that Disney Streaming's distributed systems are reliable, performant, and transparent. We build the telemetry, dashboards, alerting, insights pipelines, and developer experience tooling that enable engineers across the organization to understand system health and take action quickly. Job Summary: As a Senior Software Engineer (P3), you will lead the design and implementation of intelligent, AI-driven systems that safeguard the reliability and performance of Disney's global streaming ecosystem. You will be a technical leader in developing agentic systems, complex machine learning models, and high-throughput real-time pipelines that transform massive telemetry and log datasets into automated detection, root cause analysis, and proactive insights. In this role, you will own the architectural vision for autonomous agents capable of reasoning over complex system behaviors across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. You will act as a bridge between engineering, product, and platform teams, translating high-level business needs into scalable AI solutions that reduce operational overhead. As a P3 engineer, you are expected to deliver mission-critical features, mentor junior engineers, and drive engineering excellence through rigorous design reviews and high-quality, production-ready code in a fast-paced, AI-native environment. Responsibilities and Duties of the Role: Own the design and operation of production-grade, intelligent systems leveraging real-time signals and AI-driven detection to ensure the health of critical services and premium customer experiences. Lead the development of agentic AI systems powered by modern foundation models (e.g., Claude Opus/Sonnet, GPT-4). You will define the strategy for automated reasoning, decisioning, and predictive modeling for global-scale system reliability. Oversee the creation of end-to-end data pipelines that process high-volume telemetry and user signals into actionable, automated insights and root cause analysis. Design and maintain scalable APIs and microservices that provide explainability and predictive signals to cross-functional engineering and product stakeholders. Partner with leadership and cross-functional teams to embed intelligence into global workflows (incident response, release validation), significantly reducing Time-to-Detect (TTD) and Time-to-Resolve (TTR). Promote engineering best practices, provide technical guidance through code and design reviews, and drive innovation in observability and developer productivity through applied AI. Required Education, Experience/Skills/Training: Basic Qualifications 5+ years of applicable experience in backend development, with a proven track record of building and scaling AI-powered or data-driven applications. Advanced proficiency with modern models (GPT-4/o1, Claude Opus/Sonnet, Bedrock), including deep experience in prompt engineering, model evaluation, and building complex agentic workflows using frameworks like LangChain or LangGraph. Minimum 3 years of hands-on experience deploying and monitoring ML systems (PyTorch/TensorFlow) and large-scale data processing (PySpark, Pandas) in production environments. Strong experience with AWS ecosystem and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) at scale. Proven ability to lead technical projects, mentor junior talent, and champion software development best practices (Git, CI/CD, Agile). Expert level use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude) to accelerate team velocity and maintain high code quality. Exceptional communication skills with the ability to navigate ambiguity and explain complex AI/technical concepts to both technical and non-technical partners. Preferred Qualifications Experience implementing observability and monitoring systems for high-volume, low-latency production environments. Experience with modern databases and observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, Conviva, MongoDB) handling billions of events. Advanced knowledge of distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design patterns. Education Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience The hiring range for this position in New York City, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year, and in Glendale, CA is $141,900 - $190,300 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.
Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology
New York, New York
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: 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. 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. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 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. The News ML team is responsible for building robust data pipelines and advanced machine learning platforms that deliver personalized experiences to users across ABC News, Good Morning America, and local news stations. Our services leverage machine learning models to enable real-time content personalization and targeted distribution across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms, ensuring that users receive the most relevant and engaging news content tailored to their interests. Our mission is to drive seamless, resilient, and low-latency personalized content delivery at scale, while continuously advancing our ML infrastructure and recommendation algorithms. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a leading role in shaping the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will drive infrastructure for scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, conduct in-depth data exploration and analysis, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to power exceptional, personalized guest experiences. Your work will directly support strategic initiatives to help shape the roadmap for algorithmic innovation while ensuring that solutions are scalable, impactful, and aligned with stakeholder needs. Responsibilities Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from technical design through production deployment and operational excellence Design and develop infrastructure supporting the full cycle of machine learning, including data pipelines and workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tools, and feature libraries Drive data and ML-driven solutions for diverse engineering use cases such as recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, RAGs Partner with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions Strategically prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to deliver the highest-impact and most time-sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks to ensure successful execution Champion engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response Mentor and coach engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement Contribute to technical documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams Qualifications Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience 5+ years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods to solve real-world engineering problems Comfortable operating at all levels of the predictive stack, including data collection, data analysis, feature engineering, batch training and low-latency online serving Experience designing and developing backend microservices for large-scale distributed systems using REST Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize) Familiarity with developing and deploying Spark and ML pipelines Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, Kafka Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills, with the ability to inspire and empower a team towards achieving business goals Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring such as Datadog Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments Excellent communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year and in Glendale, CA is $141,900 - $190,300. 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.
07/30/2026
Full time
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: 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. 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. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems. 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. The News ML team is responsible for building robust data pipelines and advanced machine learning platforms that deliver personalized experiences to users across ABC News, Good Morning America, and local news stations. Our services leverage machine learning models to enable real-time content personalization and targeted distribution across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms, ensuring that users receive the most relevant and engaging news content tailored to their interests. Our mission is to drive seamless, resilient, and low-latency personalized content delivery at scale, while continuously advancing our ML infrastructure and recommendation algorithms. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a leading role in shaping the technical direction of the News ML Platform. You will drive infrastructure for scalable learning, inference, and monitoring, conduct in-depth data exploration and analysis, and collaborate across product, data, and engineering teams to power exceptional, personalized guest experiences. Your work will directly support strategic initiatives to help shape the roadmap for algorithmic innovation while ensuring that solutions are scalable, impactful, and aligned with stakeholder needs. Responsibilities Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from technical design through production deployment and operational excellence Design and develop infrastructure supporting the full cycle of machine learning, including data pipelines and workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tools, and feature libraries Drive data and ML-driven solutions for diverse engineering use cases such as recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, RAGs Partner with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions Strategically prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to deliver the highest-impact and most time-sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks to ensure successful execution Champion engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response Mentor and coach engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement Contribute to technical documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams Qualifications Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience 5+ years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods to solve real-world engineering problems Comfortable operating at all levels of the predictive stack, including data collection, data analysis, feature engineering, batch training and low-latency online serving Experience designing and developing backend microservices for large-scale distributed systems using REST Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize) Familiarity with developing and deploying Spark and ML pipelines Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, Kafka Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills, with the ability to inspire and empower a team towards achieving business goals Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring such as Datadog Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments Excellent communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $148,700 - $199,400 per year and in Glendale, CA is $141,900 - $190,300. 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.
Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology
Santa Monica, California
Principal Software Engineer, Media Architecture 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: We are redefining how streaming media is delivered, experienced, and scaled across a global ecosystem. From live and linear streaming to VOD workflows, advertising integrations, metadata platforms, and playback clients, our mission is to build a cohesive, high-performing media platform that powers world-class viewer experiences. We are seeking a Principal Software Architect to operate at the intersection of strategy and execution, shaping end-to-end solutions across the Media Engineering ecosystem. This role is not confined to a single domain. You will architect systems that span ingest, processing, orchestration, distribution, and playback across platforms such as Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. This is a hands-on architecture role for a technical leader who can define vision, influence at scale, and dive deep into code and design when needed. What You'll Do Architecture & Technical Strategy Define and drive end-to-end solution architecture across Live, Linear, and VOD streaming workflows. Establish architectural patterns that unify media ingest, processing, metadata, ads, distribution, and playback ecosystems. Lead cross-domain design for integrations with Ad platforms, metadata services, rights systems, and client applications. Contribute to long-term technical strategy, ensuring scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency across the media supply chain. Cross-Functional Leadership Partner with Engineering, Product, Program Management, and stakeholders teams to deliver cohesive platform solutions. Influence technical direction across multiple teams and organizations without direct authority. Lead architecture reviews, drive alignment, and resolve complex cross-system challenges. System Design & Implementation Design and document high-scale, distributed systems supporting millions of concurrent streams and global content distribution. Contribute to implementation where necessary, including prototyping, coding, and validating architectural decisions. Author clear architectural artifacts including solution designs, system diagrams, and technical proposals. Operational Excellence Champion best practices in observability, reliability, performance optimization, and cost management. Guide teams in building resilient systems with strong SLAs/SLOs. Use metrics and data to continuously improve system performance and user experience. Innovation & Continuous Improvement Challenge existing architectures and introduce modern approaches to evolving platform capabilities. Stay ahead of industry trends in streaming technologies, ad tech, and media workflows. Drive iterative improvements across systems, workflows, and developer experience. Basic Qualifications 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant time in architecture and distributed systems design. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience Proven experience designing and scaling high-throughput, low-latency systems in a cloud environment. Strong proficiency in one or more languages such as Java, Python, or similar. Deep understanding of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and API design. Experience with AWS or similar cloud platforms, including services such as S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, SNS/SQS, or Kafka. Strong foundation in data modeling, system design, and performance optimization. Ability to write production-quality code and contribute hands-on when needed. Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams. Preferred Qualifications Experience with media streaming systems, including Live, Linear, and VOD workflows. Knowledge of video delivery protocols (HLS, DASH), encoding/transcoding pipelines, and CDN distribution. Experience with media player and client integrations for video playback Familiarity with Ad Tech ecosystems, including SSAI, and ad decisioning systems. Experience working with player/client technologies across web, mobile, and connected devices. Exposure to machine learning applications in media workflows (e.g., content enrichment, personalization). Prior experience operating in a large-scale streaming platform environment. What Sets You Apart You think in systems, not silos, and can connect architecture across domains. You balance vision with execution, capable of both defining strategy and delivering outcomes. You are a force multiplier, elevating teams through influence, clarity, and technical leadership. You are comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving alignment across complex organizations. Product Engineering 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. The hiring range for this position in NY, NY is $197,400 to $264,700 per year and in Santa Monica, CA is $188,400 to $252,600 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.
07/30/2026
Full time
Principal Software Engineer, Media Architecture 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: We are redefining how streaming media is delivered, experienced, and scaled across a global ecosystem. From live and linear streaming to VOD workflows, advertising integrations, metadata platforms, and playback clients, our mission is to build a cohesive, high-performing media platform that powers world-class viewer experiences. We are seeking a Principal Software Architect to operate at the intersection of strategy and execution, shaping end-to-end solutions across the Media Engineering ecosystem. This role is not confined to a single domain. You will architect systems that span ingest, processing, orchestration, distribution, and playback across platforms such as Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. This is a hands-on architecture role for a technical leader who can define vision, influence at scale, and dive deep into code and design when needed. What You'll Do Architecture & Technical Strategy Define and drive end-to-end solution architecture across Live, Linear, and VOD streaming workflows. Establish architectural patterns that unify media ingest, processing, metadata, ads, distribution, and playback ecosystems. Lead cross-domain design for integrations with Ad platforms, metadata services, rights systems, and client applications. Contribute to long-term technical strategy, ensuring scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency across the media supply chain. Cross-Functional Leadership Partner with Engineering, Product, Program Management, and stakeholders teams to deliver cohesive platform solutions. Influence technical direction across multiple teams and organizations without direct authority. Lead architecture reviews, drive alignment, and resolve complex cross-system challenges. System Design & Implementation Design and document high-scale, distributed systems supporting millions of concurrent streams and global content distribution. Contribute to implementation where necessary, including prototyping, coding, and validating architectural decisions. Author clear architectural artifacts including solution designs, system diagrams, and technical proposals. Operational Excellence Champion best practices in observability, reliability, performance optimization, and cost management. Guide teams in building resilient systems with strong SLAs/SLOs. Use metrics and data to continuously improve system performance and user experience. Innovation & Continuous Improvement Challenge existing architectures and introduce modern approaches to evolving platform capabilities. Stay ahead of industry trends in streaming technologies, ad tech, and media workflows. Drive iterative improvements across systems, workflows, and developer experience. Basic Qualifications 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant time in architecture and distributed systems design. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience Proven experience designing and scaling high-throughput, low-latency systems in a cloud environment. Strong proficiency in one or more languages such as Java, Python, or similar. Deep understanding of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and API design. Experience with AWS or similar cloud platforms, including services such as S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, SNS/SQS, or Kafka. Strong foundation in data modeling, system design, and performance optimization. Ability to write production-quality code and contribute hands-on when needed. Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams. Preferred Qualifications Experience with media streaming systems, including Live, Linear, and VOD workflows. Knowledge of video delivery protocols (HLS, DASH), encoding/transcoding pipelines, and CDN distribution. Experience with media player and client integrations for video playback Familiarity with Ad Tech ecosystems, including SSAI, and ad decisioning systems. Experience working with player/client technologies across web, mobile, and connected devices. Exposure to machine learning applications in media workflows (e.g., content enrichment, personalization). Prior experience operating in a large-scale streaming platform environment. What Sets You Apart You think in systems, not silos, and can connect architecture across domains. You balance vision with execution, capable of both defining strategy and delivering outcomes. You are a force multiplier, elevating teams through influence, clarity, and technical leadership. You are comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving alignment across complex organizations. Product Engineering 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. The hiring range for this position in NY, NY is $197,400 to $264,700 per year and in Santa Monica, CA is $188,400 to $252,600 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.