Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Ad Platforms

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.

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.
 

Job Summary:

Ad Platforms is responsible for Disney’s industry-leading ad technology and products – driving advertising performance, innovation, and value in Disney’s sports, news, and entertainment content, across all media platforms.

As our team's Sr Principal Machine Learning Engineer (IC leadership role), you will apply your industry-tested experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems including Machine Learning and AI patterns, platforms and infrastructure, and leadership skills to unblock and guide our ML and Research teams to create scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines.

Daily, you should bring:

• Excellent communication and collaboration across teams and organizations.
• Strong and sound understanding of architectural best practices and principles in machine learning and AI domains
• Proficiency in designing and implementing robust, scalable, measurable models and pipelines.
• A passion for mentoring and learning in a very dynamic and fast-paced environment
• Proven ability to collaborate with Product and Sales teams, translating requirements into well-defined technical implementations. Skilled in defining technical and operational metrics for measuring system health.
• Knowledge of relevant and upcoming technologies and their potential application within the stack.
• A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
• Your unique view and experience.
• A full toolkit of influence models and clear evidence based decision making methods

Responsibilities and Expectations:

• Reviewing designs and implementations for best practices
• Influence on multi-year technical roadmap
• Cross-org impact
• Shaping product/business strategy
• Part of the Architecture Guild within Ad Platforms
• Reading requirements documentation from Product, translating into areas of work and partnering with team leads through execution as needed.
• Exploring, researching, implementing proofs-of-concept, and proposing solutions that will reduce cost and overhead, improve maintainability, minimize the time features take to be in production.
• Defining, reviewing, and documenting software and models in a high throughput, low latency environment.
• Mentoring and inspiring team members in all aspects of professional software development.
• Support on call activities with the MLP and Research teams
• Establishing shared technical standards and working practices across globally distributed ML teams.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering or relevant work experience
• 12+ years of software engineering experience
• Demonstrable analytical / problem-solving / design skills in a highly distributed and highly available services ecosystem
• Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and numerical optimization with experience in programming languages such as Python (primary), Java and SQL
• Experience with tools and frameworks such as TensorFlow, Pytorch, Hugging Face libraries
• Model optimization and inference (TensorRT, ONNX, DeepSpeed)
• Ad Tech Industry knowledge

Deep expertise in:

• LLMs and OpenAI GPT models, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and similar models.
• Fine-tuning (SFT, PEFT, RLHF, adapters)
• Prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context management, and multi-agent systems and MCPs
• Embeddings, and vector search
• Tokenization

Preferred Qualifications:

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field

The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $228,700 - $306,700 per year and in Seattle is $239,700 - $321,400. 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.