Manager, Machine Learning Engineering - Ad PlatformsThe Walt Disney Company • Santa Monica, California, United States
Manager, Machine Learning Engineering - Ad Platforms
The Walt Disney Company
- Santa Monica, California, United States
- Santa Monica, California, United States
About
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.
Reasons to 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 organization within Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology is fully responsible for building, enhancing and maintaining a high‑performance, distributed, microservice‑based advertising platform across all of Disney’s online properties, including Hulu and ESPN+. We build and maintain proprietary technology, ranging from ad serving and ad delivery to campaign management, reporting, and all integrations internal and external that evolve with a best‑in‑class video advertising business.
Our mission is to advance AI and machine learning capabilities across Ad Platforms by delivering scalable, high‑impact AI/ML and data‑science solutions that enhance various aspects of ad serving. We are seeking a Senior Manager Machine Learning to join this innovative team. This role offers a unique leadership opportunity for an experienced ML/AI and people leader who thrives at the intersection of technical excellence, strategic impact, and cross‑functional collaboration.
Job Summary 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 our ML/AI team members to design and build scalable, performant, maintainable, and testable models and pipelines in various domains using industry best practices, aligned in close collaboration with the ML team in the US and across product functions.
Daily, you should bring
A willingness and desire to effectively communicate and collaborate across teams and systems on architecture, design, and implementation.
A passion for mentoring, learning, and taking on new challenges.
A proven ability to work with product teams to translate requirements into well‑defined technical implementations.
The ability to define technical and operational metrics to measure system health.
A keen eye for potential optimizations and enhancements.
Kindness and pragmatic optimism.
A deep understanding of model development cycles and AI tool usage.
Responsibilities and Duties of the Role
Lead, mentor, and guide Data Scientists, Machine Learning, and AI engineers to build solutions adhering to industry best practices and delivering scalable solutions, including model architecture and algorithm selection.
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.
Solid understanding and usage of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.
Define strategic direction for machine learning projects and collaborate with product and engineering stakeholders.
Oversee end‑to‑end machine learning workflow, including data collection, model development, deployment, and monitoring, aligned with the larger platform strategy and tools in collaboration with global teams to stay consistent across Ad Platforms.
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.
Be available for on‑call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule for ML/AI solutions.
Basic Qualifications
Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, statistics, or a related field.
8+ years of relevant industry experience, with at least 2–3 years in a people‑management or technical leadership role.
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).
Experience building, fine‑tuning, evaluating, and deploying LLM‑based systems (e.g., RAG, prompt engineering, model optimization).
Demonstrated ability to lead global teams and collaborate across organizational boundaries.
Preferred Qualifications
Domain knowledge in the Ad Tech industry.
Experience working with large‑scale data and distributed systems.
Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and MLOps pipelines.
Track record of innovation and contributions to the ML/AI community (publications, talks, open source).
The hiring range for this position in Los Angeles, CA is $171,600 – $230,100 per year and in the Seattle Area is $179,700 – $241,000 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and 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 other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.
Disability Accommodation for Employment Applications The Walt Disney Company and its affiliated companies are Equal Employment Opportunity employers and welcome all job seekers including individuals with disabilities and veterans with disabilities. If you have a disability and believe you need a reasonable accommodation in order to search for a job opening or apply for a position, visit the Disney candidate disability accommodations FAQs. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.
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Languages
- English
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