Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ad Selection

Job Summary:

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.

As part of the Decisioning Fleet, on the Selection squad you will help build services and models enabling efficient ad fills for ad breaks across Hulu, Disney+, ESPN, and others. You will directly contribute to optimizing ad selection to make sure viewers always see the right ad at the right time.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer of our team, you will apply your knowledge and skills to help us deliver scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable software and apply ML solutions where needed.

Daily, you should bring:

• A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems.
• An understanding of the importance of project ownership.
• A passion for mentoring, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast-paced environment.
• An understanding of micro-service encapsulation and loose coupling, and why they are important.
• An understanding of ML models and knowledge of how to leverage their use online and offline.
• An understanding of how to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health and to manage risk.
• Kindness and pragmatic optimism.

Responsibilities:

• Designing, implementing, and testing logic to serve ads effectively adhering to various business criteria either with rule based or ML based solutions in a high-throughput, low-latency microservices environment.
• Enhancing systems’ observability with proper metrics, monitors, and alerts.
• Reading and understanding product user stories, and then translating them into actionable tasks for both frontend and backend components.
• Taking ownership of one or more of the team's domain areas.
• Understanding and using automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.
• Available for On-Call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science / Engineering or relevant work experience.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Proficiency with Java
• Proficient in large scale ML/DL platforms and processing tech stack.
• Experience in large scale machine learning using tools such as scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, pytorch
• Experience with LLM-based application development, using LLM-as-a-service providers such as AWS Bedrock, Azure Cognitive Services, or Google's Vertex AI
• Experience using frameworks such as LangGraph, Crew AI, and strands sdk for developing agents
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation
• Demonstrable analytical / problem-solving skills. Strong knowledge of and experience implementing AI/ML technologies and applying mathematical and statistical concepts.
• Great communication, collaboration skills, and a strong teamwork ethic with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with:

• SpringBoot and related Spring projects.
• Non-relational database technologies like DynamoDB.
• Caching datastores such as Redis, ValKey or MemCache.
• Data Streaming Mechanisms such as Apache Kafka and/or Kinesis.
• Cloud platforms such as AWS.
• Modern DevOps tools such as Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Domain knowledge in the Ad Tech industry.

Additional Information:

• Engineers are expected to be in the office four days a week.
• This role is hiring in Glendale, San Francisco, or Santa Monica

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA area is $141,900 to $190,300 per year and in San Francisco, CA is $155,400 to $208,400 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.