Product Engineering is a unified team responsible for the engineering of Disney Entertainment & ESPN digital and streaming products and platforms. This includes product engineering, media engineering, quality assurance, engineering behind personalization, commerce, lifecycle, and identity.
The Core ML team is an applied science and machine learning engineering team that owns the core personalization algorithms powering Disney+ and Hulu. Our work spans real-time ranking, content and user understanding, candidate retrieval, and post-ranking, serving recommendations to one of the largest streaming audiences in the world. We operate at the intersection of research and production: we ideate, prototype, validate, and ship, and we are responsible for driving the innovation that moves the personalization experience forward
We are looking for a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to help us ideate, develop, iterate on, and productionize personalization algorithms across the recommendation stack. This includes our core ranking algorithms, content and user understanding models and graphs, as well as candidate retrieval and post-ranking systems.
There is more than one way to be a great fit for this role. You might be a strong applied scientist with sharp intuition for recommendation approaches, evaluation methodology, and how data, features, and objectives shape model behavior. You might be a strong end-to-end ML engineer who can take ideas to production at scale and keep systems healthy, maintainable, and easy to iterate on. Ideally, you bring a blend of both: someone who generates ideas of their own, helps other applied scientists bring theirs to life, and can jump in from either the science or the engineering side when something needs attention.
This is also an opportunity to work at the frontier. We are especially excited about candidates with strong relevant experience (RecSys, ML, AI/LLM) who can help bridge where recommendation systems are today and where the field is heading, applying modern AI techniques not only to improve recommendations themselves, but to improve how we build, evaluate, and iterate on our systems.
In this role, you will help drive the vision and innovation behind Disney’s personalization systems, with the goal of delighting our users through great content recommendations, improving customer satisfaction, and deepening our understanding of both content and users.