Data scientists at Disney are the insights and modeling partners for the growth, content, marketing, product, and engineering teams at Disney. They use data to empower decision-makers with information, predictions, and insights that ultimately influence the experiences of millions of users worldwide. Scientists on the team build models, perform statistical analysis, and create visualizations to provide scalable, persistent capability that is iteratively improved through direct interaction with cross-functional business partners.

Our team is looking for an experienced data scientist to be part of one of our distribution platform teams, which are responsible for building and operating the services that power experiences across many of Disney’s most recognized brands, including ABC, ABC News, Marvel and National Geographic. This role will be specifically focused on building a personalization platform that powers personalized experiences such as content to content recommendation on products owned by the above brands. You will help deliver the
ML data models, APIs, and data required for product teams to create delightful, personalized experiences for our guests. We look for someone with deep analytical and modeling expertise, a proven track record of thought leadership and eagerness to drive impact.

Responsibilities:

You’ll make a great fit for our team if you like to do these things:

• Modeling: Design, build and improve machine learning models. Work end to end from data collection, feature generation and selection, algorithm development, forecasting, visualization and communicating of model results. Collaborate with engineering to productionize models. Drive experimentation to test impact of model-based optimization.
• Deep analysis: Develop comprehensive understanding of guest engagement data and metrics. Mine large data sets to identify opportunities for improving content recommendations.
• Visualization of Complex Data sets: Development of prototype solutions, mathematical models, algorithms, and robust analytics leading to actionable insights communicated clearly and visually.
• Partnership: Partner closely with business stakeholders to identify and unlock opportunities, and with other data teams to improve platform capabilities around data modeling, data visualization, experimentation and data architecture.

You’ll be expected to be 100% hands-on development and deliver quickly and iteratively in an agile environment with an opportunity to provide mentorship and leadership to other team members as we build a world class platform supporting some of Disney’s premier brands.

Basic Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative field (e.g. Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Operations Research, Econometrics, Statistics)
• 5+ years of relevant industry experience designing, building, and evaluating practical machine learning solutions
• 5+ years of experience with statistical programming language (e.g. Python, Spark, PySpark) and database languages (e.g. SQL)
• Familiarity with data platforms and applications such as Databricks, Jupyter, Snowflake, Airflow, Github
• Demonstrate the following scientist qualities: clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, fairness and aptitude for original research
• Capability to educate the organization both from technical and business perspectives on new approaches, such as testing hypotheses and statistical validation of results
• Comfortable working in a team environment using Agile methodologies
• Proven experience providing technical mentorship to junior team members
• Experience with developing for public clouds like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Experience with Docker
• Experience with ETL pipelines

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven experience developing, monitoring, and maintaining high-volume and highly-available distributed systems
• Familiarity with data exploration and data visualization tools such as Tableau, Looker
• Familiarity with designing and analyzing A/B testing and other experiment types
• Excellent programming skills and strong knowledge of the Java platform and Java web applications and frameworks (Spring/Tomcat/etc)
• Deep understanding of web architecture including HTTP, caching and API delivery paradigms (REST, GraphQL)
• Experience with full software development lifecycle and common best practices like unit testing, collaborative version control flows, and continuous integration