Senior Machine Learning Engineer - News

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer focused on News. In this role you will shape the News ML Platform and build scalable ML infrastructure to power real-time content personalization and targeted distribution across ABC News, Good Morning America, and local stations. You will collaborate with product, data, and engineering teams to drive algorithmic innovation and deliver scalable, personalized guest experiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from design through production deployment and ongoing operations
• Design and evolve infrastructure supporting the full machine learning lifecycle, including data pipelines, workflow orchestration, data discovery and quality tooling, and feature libraries
• Deliver data- and ML-driven solutions for diverse engineering use cases such as recommendation systems, object detection, autogenerated tagging solutions, and RAGs
• Collaborate with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions
• Prioritize initiatives and technical workstreams to maximize impact and address time-sensitive needs, while proactively identifying and mitigating risks
• Advocate for engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response
• Mentor engineers to foster ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to technical documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Math, or a comparable field, and/or equivalent work experience
• Five or more years of experience building and operating ML engineering systems in production environments
• Strong background in data science, deep learning algorithms, or statistical methods to solve real-world engineering problems
• Experience across the predictive stack, including data collection, 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, including Step Functions, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, and Personalize
• Familiarity with developing and deploying Spark and ML pipelines
• Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Databricks, Kinesis, and Kafka
• Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills with the ability to guide a team toward business goals
• Experience with observability tools for metrics, logging, and monitoring such as Datadog
• Background in Agile/Scrum development environments
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative approach in a fast-paced, guest-focused environment

Technologies

• REST
• AWS
• Step Functions
• Lambda
• Glue
• SQS
• SNS
• Personalize
• Spark
• Databricks
• Kinesis
• Kafka
• Datadog

Benefits

• bonus and/or long-term incentive units
• medical benefits
• financial benefits
• other benefits