Senior Machine Learning Engineer

BUILD SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF 

 
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. 

How will you contribute to our magical experience? 

Media Engineering powers the core technology behind Disney+, Hulu, ESPN, and future streaming innovations. The Content Library team sits at the heart of this ecosystem, owning the systems responsible for title metadata and content descriptors that shape user experiences across our platforms. 

We are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in deployment and ML platform development to help evolve the intelligence behind our metadata systems. You’ll focus on developing machine learning models to improve entity resolution, duplicate detection, and metadata quality at scale — foundational problems with deep technical and business impact. 

This is a deployment-focused MLE role centered on building the infrastructure and services that bring ML models to production. You’ll own data pipelines, feature engineering, and model deployment—working closely with model developers to operationalize experiments into scalable, reliable systems. Success in this role requires strong AWS/cloud engineering skills, a focus on automation and MLOps, and an iterative mindset for rolling out and improving models over time. You'll collaborate with teams across the U.S. and Beijing to scale our applied ML platform. 

The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will be responsible for: 

• Build and maintain robust data pipelines and services to support model deployment at scale 

• Own the ML deployment lifecycle: from feature engineering and inference pipelines to monitoring and model rollout. 

• Collaborate with ML engineers and data scientists to productionize models with reliability and performance in mind. 

• Develop and deploy backend services using Java or Python, integrating with AWS infrastructure (e.g., S3, SageMaker, Lambda, SQS). 

• Automate workflows and implement tooling for continuous delivery, testing, and validation of ML models. 

• Ensure service availability and performance through observability, alerting, and operational excellence. 

• Champion best practices in MLOps, infrastructure design, and scalable system architecture. 

What we need from you to be part of this story: 

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong proficiency in Python and/or Java. 

• Proven track record deploying ML models into production systems. 

• Deep familiarity with AWS services like SageMaker, Lambda, S3, SQS, and Glue. 

• Experience building scalable data pipelines and feature engineering workflows. 

• Solid understanding of ML lifecycle, including inference, monitoring, and versioning. 

• Proficiency in working with both relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, ElastiCache) databases. 

• Advanced level of English. 

• Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and software design. 

• Familiarity with Kafka, Kinesis, or other messaging/streaming platforms (is a plus) 

• Experience with natural language processing (NLP) or metadata classification (is a plus) 

• Familiarity with Elasticsearch or other search/indexing platforms (is a plus) 

• Experience optimizing feature stores or building pipelines for large-scale ML systems (is a plus) 

• Exposure to front-end development (ReactJS) to support full-stack integration of ML services (is a plus). 

Additional Information 

At Disney, we believe it takes great people to create the memorable experiences, products and services our consumers know and love. We are a team of storytellers and hire under equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender identity. We foster a corporate culture of belonging and inclusiveness, which empowers our staff and company to thrive. At Disney, everyone has the opportunity to speak up and participate, grow and share ideas. 
 
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney