Applied Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists on the Disney Streaming Machine Learning and Innovation team develop and maintain recommendation and personalization algorithms for Disney Streamings suite of streaming video apps, notably Disney+ and Hulu. They specialize in applying machine learning methods to meet strategic product personalization goals, explore innovative, cutting edge techniques that can be applied to recommendations, and constantly seek ways to optimize operational processes.


As a member of this team you will collaborate across Engineering, Product, and Data teams to better understand challenges and develop automated solutions to be built into our products. You will be expected to contribute to recommendation and personalization algorithm research, development, and optimization for particular product areas, and to coordinate requirements and manage stakeholder expectations with product, engineering, and editorial teams.


**Responsibilities:**


- Algorithm development and maintenance: Utilize cutting edge machine learning methods to develop algorithms for personalization, recommendation, and other predictive systems; maintain algorithms deployed to production and be the point person in explaining methodologies to technical and non-technical teams


- Analysis and Algorithm Optimization: Perform deep dive analysis on app interactions and user profiles as they relate to algorithm output in order to drive improvements in key personalization metrics


- MVP development: Develop innovative machine learning products to be used for new production features or downstream by production algorithms


- Development Best Practices: Maintain existing and establish new algorithm development, testing, and deployment standards


- Collaborate with product and business stakeholders: Identify and define new personalization opportunities and work with other data teams to improve how we do data collection, experimentation and analysis


**Basic Qualifications:**


+ 3+ years of analytical experience

+ 3+ years of experience developing machine learning models and performing data analysis with Python or R

+ 2+ years writing production-level, scalable code (e.g. Python, Scala)

+ 2+ years of experience developing algorithms for deployment to production systems

+ Bachelor's degree in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field

+ In-depth understanding of modern machine learning (e.g. deep learning methods), models, and their mathematical underpinnings

+ In-depth understanding of the latest in natural language processing techniques and contextualized word embedding models

+ Experience with cloud services in a production environment (particularly AWS)

+ Familiarity with data exploration and data visualization tools like Tableau, Looker, Chartio, etc.

+ Understanding of statistical concepts (e.g., hypothesis testing, regression analysis)

+ Ability to gauge the complexity of machine learning problems and a willingness to execute simple approaches for quick, effective solutions as appropriate

+ Strong written and verbal communication skills

+ Ability to explain how models are used and algorithms behave to both technical and non-technical audiences


**Preferred Qualifications:**


+ MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, or related quantitative field

+ Production experience with developing content recommendation algorithms at scale

+ Production experience with graph based models (e.g. node2vec)

+ Experience building and deploying full stack ML pipelines: data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment

+ Experience with graph-based data workflows such as Apache Airflow

+ Experience engineering big-data solutions using technologies like EMR, S3, Spark, Databricks

+ Familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance

+ Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases such as Snowflake

+ Building streaming data pipelines using Kafka, Spark, or Flink

+ Familiarity with automated deployment, AWS infrastructure, Docker or similar containers


**Preferred Education:**


+ MS or PhD in statistics, math, computer science, social science, or related quantitative field


**Additional Information:**


Location: New York, NY, San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA preferred but also open to US Remote for the right candidate


\#DisneyTech


**Job ID:** 7113686920220306

**Location:** New York,New York

**Job Posting Company:**
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, email Candidate.Accommodations@Disney.com with your request. This email address is not for general employment inquiries or correspondence. We will only respond to those requests that are related to the accessibility of the online application system due to a disability.