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.

The Commerce, Growth & Identity (CGI) team is dedicated to three business-critical areas at Disney that will help transform its media business. We build innovative and cutting-edge capabilities to drive subscriptions, engagement and monetization across Disney’s streaming and digital products. We enable the wide range of Disney brands to connect and engage with consumers through a unified identity, powered by shared services that are trustworthy and seamless to integrate with.

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer with a passion for cutting-edge AI to drive impactful solutions in the Customer Support domain. This role offers the opportunity to lead applied research and engineering efforts that bring intelligent automation and personalized experiences to millions of customers across Disney’s media platforms. You'll partner with cross-functional teams to design, prototype, and productionize AI-driven systems — from natural language understanding to agent assist tools and predictive analytics — all with the goal of enhancing the customer support experience.

As a Lead ML Engineer, you will be responsible to

• Rapidly analyze and prototype AI-driven solutions that address key pain points for both customers using self-service systems and customer service (CS) agents interacting with internal tooling.
• Own and maintain production AI systems, including those leveraging large language models (LLMs); this includes optimization, fine-tuning, and debugging to ensure robustness and performance at scale.
• Bridge customer support needs with commerce platform capabilities, identifying which problems can be solved using existing infrastructure and which require new AI-powered solutions.
• Assess the effectiveness of deployed AI solutions through a data-driven lens, continuously iterating on what works and sunsetting or replacing what doesn’t deliver meaningful impact.
• Collaborate with other AI-focused teams across Disney Streaming, sharing innovations and adopting best practices to drive consistency, scalability, and impact in AI initiatives.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field; PhD is a plus.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and evaluating LLM based solutions.
• Minimum 7 years of related work experience in building, deploying, and evaluating real-world machine learning solutions.  
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and other relevant programming languages.
• Experience with data wrangling and analysis tools such as Pandas, NumPy, and working knowledge of databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with big data and workflow platforms, including Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, Airflow, Jupyter, and GitHub.
• Proven experience leading end-to-end ML project lifecycles, including model design, experimentation, product deployment, CI/CD for ML pipelines, and ongoing monitoring.
• Excellent problem-solving abilities, with strong communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with Amazon Web Services.
• Experience with Tableau, Power BI, or similar platforms.
• Experience building anomaly detection models.

The hiring range for this position in New York, NY is $175,800 to $235,700 per year, in Los Angeles, CA is $167,700 to $224,900 per year, and in San Francisco, CA is $183,700 to $246,400 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.