Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer

New Yesterday

Job Summary:
We are hiring a Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer to shape the future of personalization and content recommendations across Disney+, Hulu, ABC, and ESPN. As one of the most senior technical leaders in our organization, you will set the direction for machine learning innovation at scale—guiding both long-term vision and near-term execution for products that impact hundreds of millions of users. This is a strategic individual contributor role with broad technical scope and organizational influence. You will define architectural standards for personalization systems, lead cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple business units, and drive the development of novel algorithms that deliver measurable user and business value. You will partner with executive leadership across Engineering, Product, and Data to align personalization strategies with company-wide priorities. In addition to solving high-impact technical challenges, you will serve as a thought leader and mentor—elevating the work of other senior engineers and helping build a culture of technical excellence and innovation across the organization. Responsibilities: Define and drive the long-term technical vision for personalization and recommendation systems across Disney+, Hulu, ABC, and ESPN—ensuring alignment with overarching product and business strategies.
Lead the development of foundational machine learning architectures and algorithms, enabling scalable, real-time, and highly personalized user experiences for hundreds of millions of users.
Serve as a cross-functional thought leader, partnering with senior executives in Product, Engineering, Data, and Design to influence company-wide personalization strategy and investment.
Identify and drive high-impact initiatives that advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning, guiding efforts from concept through deployment with measurable business outcomes.
Mentor and elevate technical leaders across teams, fostering a culture of innovation, rigor, and excellence in machine learning engineering.
Set standards for experimentation, model evaluation, and algorithm fairness; establish frameworks and tools to accelerate development and promote reproducibility.
Represent Disney Streaming’s personalization efforts in strategic forums, internal councils, and external technical communities (., conferences, publications, industry panels).
Basic Qualifications: Track recordings of research & publications in recommendation system domain with deep neural net algorithms.
Strong proficiency in at least one of the following deep learning frameworks, tensorflow, pytorch.
Experiences building and deploying full stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment.
Track record from design to full production of effective recommendation systems.
Experience with cloud services in a production environment (particularly AWS).
Understanding of statistical concepts (., hypothesis testing, regression analysis).
Ability to articulate the usage and behavior of models and algorithms to both technical and non-technical audiences.
12+ years of relevant experience
Preferred Qualifications: Master’s or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field.
Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale and familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance.
Deep understanding in personalization challenges in homepage experience and proven records of developing effective solutions.
Experience with: 12+ years of experience in developing highly scalable machine learning products
12+ years writing production-level, scalable Python codes
Required Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience
The hiring range for this position in Seattle, WA & New York, NY is $234,400 to $314,300 per year, in San Francisco, CA is $245,100 to $328,600 per year and in Los Angeles/Santa Monica, CA is $223,700 to $300,000 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.
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Location:
Seattle

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