Senior Machine Learning Engineering Manager, Ad Platforms

About the role

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+. We 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.

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.
• Solid understanding and usage of automated tools (AI) while adhering to company policy.
• Oversee end-2-end machine learning workflow, including data collection, model development, deployment and modeling. These are expected to be aligned with the larger platform strategy and tools in collaboration with the 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.
• Available for On-Call rotations based on the team’s escalation policy and support schedule for ML/AI solutions

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).
• 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.