Senior Machine Learning Engineer

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 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 platforms like Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you'll focus on developing and deploying ML models to improve entity resolution, duplicate detection, and metadata quality at scale.

This deployment-focused MLE role centers on building 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. The role requires strong AWS/cloud engineering skills, focus on MLOps, and an iterative mindset for rolling out and improving models over time.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain robust data pipelines and services to support model deployment at scale
• Own the ML deployment lifecycle from feature engineering to monitoring
• Collaborate with ML engineers and data scientists to productionize models
• Develop backend services using Java/Python, integrating with AWS infrastructure
• Automate workflows and implement tooling for continuous delivery
• Ensure service availability through observability and alerting
• Champion best practices in MLOps and scalable system architecture

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience with Python/Java
• Proven track record deploying ML models to production
• Deep familiarity with AWS services (SageMaker, Lambda, S3, SQS, Glue)
• Experience building scalable data pipelines
• Solid understanding of ML lifecycle
• Proficiency with relational and NoSQL databases
• Strong CS fundamentals
• Advanced English proficiency

The role offers the opportunity to work with teams across the U.S. and Beijing while helping scale Disney's applied ML platform. You'll be part of a global team reimagining how technology and creativity come together to deliver world-class entertainment experiences.