Lead Machine Learning Engineer - News

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to lead the News ML team in Glendale, CA. The role focuses on shaping technical direction and delivering scalable end-to-end machine learning for real-time, personalized news experiences across web, mobile, and connected TV.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end, spanning technical design, production deployment, and operational excellence.
• Design and build infrastructure for the full machine learning lifecycle, including data pipelines and workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tooling, and feature libraries.
• Deliver data and ML solutions across diverse engineering scenarios, including recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, and RAGs.
• Collaborate with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into durable technical implementations.
• Set technical priorities and manage workstreams to focus on high-impact, time-sensitive outcomes, while proactively identifying, communicating, and mitigating risks.
• Promote engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor and coach engineers to strengthen ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Support technical documentation and facilitate knowledge sharing across teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or a comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience developing and deploying machine learning systems in production.
• Expertise in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods used to address practical engineering problems.
• Comfort working across 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.
• Cloud infrastructure experience, preferably AWS (Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize).
• Experience building and deploying Spark and machine learning pipelines.
• Hands-on big data experience with technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, and Kafka.
• Demonstrated leadership, coaching, and mentoring experience to help a team achieve business goals.
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring such as Datadog.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum development environments.
• Strong communication skills and a commitment to collaboration in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment.

Location and Employment Details

• Location: Glendale, CA (onsite)
• Salary Range: USD 141,900 - 190,300 per year
• Experience Level: 7+ years

Technical Stack

• AWS: Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, Personalize
• Backend and ML Infrastructure: REST, Spark, Databricks
• Data Streaming and Big Data: Kinesis, Kafka
• Observability: Datadog