Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Ad Platforms
About the role
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.
Responsibilities
- Reviewing designs and implementations for best practices
- Influence on multi-year technical roadmap
- Cross-org impact
- Shaping product/business strategy
- Part of the Architecture Guild within Ad Platforms
- Reading requirements documentation from Product, translating into areas of work and partnering with team leads through execution as needed.
- Exploring, researching, implementing proofs-of-concept, and proposing solutions that will reduce cost and overhead, improve maintainability, minimize the time features take to be in production.
- Defining, reviewing, and documenting software and models in a high throughput, low latency environment.
- Mentoring and inspiring team members in all aspects of professional software development.
- Support on call activities with the MLP and Research teams
- Establishing shared technical standards and working practices across globally distributed ML teams.
Qualifications
- BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering or relevant work experience
- 12+ years of software engineering experience
- Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and numerical optimization with experience in programming languages such as Python (primary), Java and SQL
- Experience with tools and frameworks such as TensorFlow, Pytorch, Hugging Face libraries
- Model optimization and inference (TensorRT, ONNX, DeepSpeed)
- Ad Tech Industry knowledge
- Deep expertise in:
- LLMs and OpenAI GPT models, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and similar models.
- Fine-tuning (SFT, PEFT, RLHF, adapters)
- Prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context management, and multi-agent systems and MCPs
- Embeddings, and vector search
- Tokenization
Bonus Information
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.