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 their businesses.
The Ad Platforms organization within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is fully responsible for building, enhancing and maintaining high-performance, distributed, microservice-based Advertising Platform across all of Disney online properties, including Hulu and ESPN+. They build and maintain proprietary technology, ranging from ad serving and ad delivery, campaign management, reporting as well as all the integrations internal and external that come with evolving and maintaining a best-in-class video advertising business.
The mission is to advance AI and machine learning capabilities across Ad Platform by delivering scalable, high impact AI/ML and data science solutions that enhance various aspects of ad serving.
You will apply your battle-tested experience, deep technical knowledge of software and systems including Machine Learning and AI technologies, and leadership skills to unblock and guide the ML/AI team members to design and build scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines in various domains using industry best practices.
Responsibilities and Duties of the Role:
- Lead, mentor and guide senior individual contributors and managers across data scientists, machine learning and AI engineers teams to build solutions adhering to industry best practices and deliver scalable solutions including model architecture and algorithm selection.
- Define strategic direction for machine learning projects and collaborate with product and engineering stakeholders.
- Lead by example and always strive to improve the design for more scalable, cleaner, and decoupled implementations.
- Drive adoption of best practices in model development, code quality, testing, and documentation.
- Oversee end-2-end machine learning workflow, including data collection, model development, deployment and modeling.
- Foster innovation by exploring new ML techniques, tools, and technologies.
- Communicate strategies, progress, and results to leadership and cross-functional teams.
- Ensure responsible AI practices, including fairness, explainability, and compliance with privacy and ethical standards.
- Develop partnerships across the organization to identify and prioritize high-impact ML opportunities.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
- 10+ years of relevant industry experience, with at least 5 years in people-management managing senior ICs and managers.
- Proven ability to translate business problems into scalable ML and GenAI solutions and strong understanding of machine learning fundamentals, deep learning, and statistical modeling.
- Proven experience designing, building, and deploying scalable machine learning models and systems in production.
- Experience deploying ML/GenAI systems at scale using cloud platforms and MLOps practices
- Advanced programming proficiency (e.g., Python, Java, or similar); experience with ML/DL frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face).
The hiring range for this position in Santa Monica, CA is $210,500.00 - $282,300.00 per year and in Seattle, WA is $220,600.00 - $295,900.00 per year.