Sr Machine Learning Engineer

Department Description:

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

Team Description:

Reporting to the Director of Automation, Tooling, and Observability within Global Network Engineering & Operations (GNEO), the Machine Learning / Software Engineer plays a critical role in designing, developing, and implementing self-healing infrastructure management systems for enterprise-wide, production environments. This role combines deep expertise in machine learning, AI technology, software engineering, and DevOps to create reusable patterns, frameworks, and services to improve reliability across Services and Platforms. The candidate will serve as a thought leader, identifying opportunities for and applying advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and AI to large-scale telemetry, changes, events and incident data to derive actionable insights. The role focuses on building, deploying, and operating machine learning models that proactively detect issues, predict failures, and drive automated, self-healing remediation across enterprise systems. The role is intentionally machine learning and AI heavy and is intended to be a strategic driver in that space.

What You’ll Do:

• Work alongside our first-class applications, infrastructure & operations teams to understand current manual processes and business requirements

• Architect, design, and implement reusable machine learning frameworks, patterns, and services that integrate into the enterprise automation and observability platforms

• Design, train, and deploy machine learning models for anomaly detection, forecasting, predictive analytics, event correlation, pattern recognition, classification, causal analysis, and more in distributed environments that can be used to surface leading indicators of failure

• Build near-real-time inference pipelines that generate actionable insights from live telemetry, including continuous streams of metrics, logs, traces, and operational events

• Create data abstractions and perform feature engineering on high-volume, high-cardinality telemetry data

• Evaluate model performance using real production signals and continuously iterate to improve accuracy and reliability

• Build closed-loop, event-driven systems where model signals trigger automated remediation actions

• Partner with infrastructure and SRE teams to identify opportunities and integrate machine learning and AI-driven insights into operational tools, workflows, and dashboards

• Analyze incident and historical data to uncover leading indicators and predictive signals

• Own the full machine learning lifecycle: experimentation, validation, deployment, monitoring, and retraining

• Breakdown targeted, manual processes into reusable software modules that leverage machine learning models

• Build emulation and simulation environments (digital twins) of the infrastructure to test AI/ML-driven automation under realistic scenarios and allow for faster ideation and iteration for architects and engineers.

• Develop algorithms and frameworks to integrate machine learning and AI technologies into our orchestration platform

• Ensure service reliability, performance, and operational uptime through code-driven solutions.

• Conduct root cause analysis, design fault-tolerant architectures, and enable self-healing automation.

• Implement monitoring dashboards and KPIs to provide visibility into automation and tooling performance.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including network engineers, software developers, machine learning engineers, and operations teams across the enterprise.

• Support the integration of commercial and open-source tools while maintaining a vendor-agnostic implementation

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with expertise in automation, machine learning, and AI technologies

• Proven hands-on experience building production-grade ML models and inference pipelines; strong proficiency with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, etc.

• Design, train, and deploy machine learning models for anomaly detection, forecasting, predictive analytics, event correlation, pattern recognition, classification, causal analysis, and more in distributed environments that can be used to surface leading indicators of failure

• Proven hands-on experience using software to build frontend, APIs and backend functionality; strong proficiency with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, or Rust

• Build emulation and simulation environments (digital twins) of the infrastructure to test AI/ML-driven automation under realistic scenarios and allow for faster ideation and iteration for architects and engineers.

• Strong hands-on experience building and deploying event-driven or streaming data, machine learning models in production

• Solid foundation in statistics, data analysis, and applied machine learning techniques

• Experience working with large-scale, real-world datasets (noisy, incomplete, non-standardized, and evolving)

• Experience operationalizing models in distributed, production environments

• Ability to translate ambiguous operational problems into solvable machine learning use cases

• Experience with modern cloud platforms, container orchestration (Kubernetes/Docker), identity/auth frameworks, data and workflow orchestration.

• Experience with AI/ML technologies and data engineering concepts. Preferred: Proven hands-on building AI agents.

• Demonstrated success designing and building enterprise-scale systems and reusable software frameworks.

• Strong communication, collaboration and leadership skills

• Applies systems thinking to understand how individual components fit into larger, more holistic solutions.

• Capable of quickly shifting between detailed, hands-on work and high-level strategic thinking.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Certifications such as Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD), AWS/Azure/GCP certifications, CCNP/DevNet or NVIDIA AI engineer.

• Experience developing low-code/no-code automation platforms or reusable developer toolkits.

• Contributions to open-source automation, machine learning, AI, observability, or DevOps communities.

• Applying unsupervised and semi-supervised learning for anomaly detection and signal discovery

• Applying complex event processing and event correlation techniques

• Building time-series forecasting models for capacity, latency, and failure prediction

• Experience with feature stores, offline/online feature pipelines, and feature reuse

• Implementing model monitoring for drift, bias, and performance degradation

• Experience with reinforcement learning or decision models for automated remediation and optimization

• Working with real-time or near-real-time inference pipelines

• Experience labeling, curating, and managing training data derived from production telemetry

• Experience mentoring engineers, sharing knowledge, and fostering a learning culture

• Demonstrated curiosity and continuous learning mindset, with a passion for exploring emerging AI/ML, automation, and platform technologies

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

Preferred Education:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline.

#DISNEYTECH

The hiring range for this position in Burbank, CA is $155,700 - $208,700 per year and in Seattle is $163,100 - $218,700 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.