Description
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.
The News & Entertainment Machine Learning (N&E ML) team is responsible for building robust data pipelines and advanced machine learning platforms that deliver personalized experiences to users across Disney's News & Entertainment portfolio including ABC News, ABC Entertainment, National Geographic, Marvel, and Disney Studios.
As a Lead Data Scientist, you will act as the bridge between data and product decisions for the N&E ML Platform, ensuring that machine learning and personalization investments translate into measurable business impact across Disney's News & Entertainment portfolio.
Responsibilities:
- Conduct exploratory data analysis across user, content, and engagement data to identify patterns, trends, and behavioral insights.
- Design, implement, and evaluate A/B tests and other controlled experiments to validate product and personalization changes.
- Define success metrics for ML-driven features and measure model performance against them.
- Partner closely with Machine Learning Engineers on feature design, drift detection, and model evaluation.
- Translate data insights into clear, actionable product recommendations.
- Apply statistical analysis using Python, SQL, and PySpark to large-scale datasets.
- Act as the bridge between data and product decisions, ensuring that ML and personalization improvements translate into measurable business impact.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Statistics, Mathematics, Economics, or a comparable quantitative field of study.
- 7+ years of experience in data science, analytics, or a related field.
- Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and PySpark for large-scale data analysis and manipulation.
- Deep experience with cloud data platforms such as AWS, Databricks, or Snowflake.
- Experience with statistical analysis and experimentation, including designing, running, and interpreting A/B tests.
- Demonstrated ability to conduct exploratory data analysis and translate patterns in user behavior into clear, actionable insights.
- Experience defining success metrics and measuring model performance in partnership with Machine Learning Engineers.
- Proven ability to translate data insights into product recommendations that influence roadmap and prioritization decisions.
- Experience with Adobe Analytics or comparable web/product analytics platforms.
- Experience working with large-scale content or media platforms serving millions of consumers.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with agentic AI workflows and frameworks.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools.
- Familiarity with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation frameworks for large language models.
- Experience with MLOps platforms and modern model lifecycle management tools.
- Contributions to internal knowledge-sharing, conference talks, or publications related to data science or experimentation.
The hiring range for this position in California is $158,100.00 to $211,900.00 per year.