Senior Principal Machine Learning Architect, 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.

The Senior Principal ML Architect is responsible for designing, developing, and operationalizing scalable machine-learning and artificial-intelligence solutions across the Ad Platform organization. This role partners closely with engineering, product, and data teams to define system architecture, ensure data quality, and deploy models into production. The AI/ML Architect evaluates emerging technologies, establishes best practices, and drives the end-to-end ML lifecycle, enabling the business to deliver reliable, high-impact AI capabilities. This role will be a part of multiple fleets including AI/ML teams. 

Responsibilities and Expectations:

• Influence strategies to address internal or external business objectives. 
• Lead highly visible multidisciplinary projects or initiatives, providing thought leadership and influences decision making. 
• Proactively identify and solve complex and business critical matters that impact the direction of overall business. 

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, learning, and adapting to a very dynamic and fast-paced environment
• Proven ability to collaborate with product 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.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering or relevant work experience
• 12 years of experience in software engineering, architecture, or relevant fields. 
• Proficiency in toolkits like TensorFlow, PyTorch or other deep learning frameworks. 
• Experience using Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock and other related ML services. 
• 10+ years in machine learning, with at least 2 years of experience in LLMs, diffusion models, or other generative image/video models 
• Experience in distributed training, model parallelism, and deployment of large-scale generative models 
• Knowledge of techniques such as quantization, distillation, and efficient inference. Experience with deploying large ML models in real world products 
• Strong background in conducting experiments, analyzing results, and iterating model improvements. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Collaborate with business stakeholders to define data strategies that align with the organization’s objectives. 
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders to ensure that data solutions meet business requirements and align with technological capabilities. 
• Experience in multi-modal models (e.g., image, video, audio, or motion modalities) 
• Experience building platforms for model governance and AI lifecycle management. 
• Background in high-availability, low-latency system design. 
• Strong experience in working with AWS cloud and its technologies.  
• Experience in Ad – Platform domain, streaming technologies.   

#DISNEYTECH

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.