Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology Machine Learning Engineer Intern, Summer 2025

About the Role & Program

Are you the right applicant for this opportunity Find out by reading through the role overview below.

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future.

Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology :

• Building the future of Disney’s media business : DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach & Scale : The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
• Innovation : We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

The approximate dates of this internship are May / June 2025 through August / September 2025.

By applying to this Machine Learning Engineering Internship position, you will be considered for opportunities across multiple teams and projects which are based in any of the following locations :

• Santa Monica, CA
• Seattle, WA

What You Will Do

Our team develops and maintains recommendation and personalization algorithms for Disney Streaming’s suite of streaming video apps, notably Disney+ and Hulu.

As a member of this team you will collaborate across Engineering, Product, and Data teams to apply 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.

What you might do...

Algorithm Development and Maintenance : Utilize cutting edge machine learning methods to develop and implement 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.

Feature Engineering and Optimization : Develop and maintain ETL pipelines using orchestration tools such as Airflow and Jenkins;

deploy scalable streaming and batch data pipelines to support petabyte scale datasets.

• 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.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• Knowledge or experience in developing machine learning models, performing large-scale data analysis, and / or data engineering experience.
• Experience writing scalable code (e.g. Python, Scala).
• Basic understanding of modern machine learning (e.g. deep learning methods), models, and their mathematical underpinnings.
• Experience or knowledge of deploying and maintaining pipelines (AWS, Docker, Airflow) and in engineering big-data solutions using technologies like Databricks, S3, and Spark.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience or knowledge of AWS, Docker, Airflow, Databricks.
• Experience or knowledge of building and deploying full stack ML pipelines : data extraction, data mining, model training, feature development, testing, and deployment.
• Familiar with metadata management, data lineage, and principles of data governance.
• Experience loading and querying cloud-hosted databases.
• Building streaming data pipelines using Kafka, Spark, or Flink.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and / or equivalent work experience.
• At the time of application, must be enrolled in an accredited college / university taking at least one class in the semester / quarter (spring / fall) prior to participation in the internship program AND returning to school the semester / quarter following the internship OR currently participating in a Disney College Program or Disney Internship.
• Undergraduate students in their Junior or Senior year preferred.

Candidates for this opportunity MUST meet all of the below requirements :

• Be at least 18 years of age.
• Have not completed one year of continual employment on a Disney internship or program.
• Possess unrestricted work authorization.

Additional Information

• The approximate dates of this internship are May / June 2025 through August / September 2025.
• Fully available from Monday - Friday, for the duration of the 12 week internship, 40 hours each week.
• Able to have a consistent, reliable work schedule throughout the internship.
• Able to provide own housing for the duration internship program in Santa Monica, CA and / or Seattle area.
• Able to provide / have reliable transportation to / from work.

The pay rate for this role in Santa Monica, CA and Seattle, WA is $40 per hour. Select benefits may be provided as part of the compensation package, such as medical, financial, and / or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

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