Sr. Principal Data Scientist (Agentic AI)

Description

The company makes stories and entertainment for every age group and audience, across streaming, linear TV, advertising and direct-to-consumer platforms, and it works across studios, direct-to-consumer and TV media.

This is a senior individual contributor role for an experienced practitioner with 15, 18+ years of experience, including 10, 14 years of deep, hands-on work in data science, ML and AI systems at enterprise scale. The role carries no formal people management. It is about technical depth, architectural rigor and scientific quality.

You will work on some of the company's most complex and business-critical AI systems, shaping how content is created, distributed, personalized, monetized and optimized.

The work suits someone who likes hard, open problems, pushes the limits of applied ML and turns advanced science into lasting business value.

Responsibilities

• Design and build enterprise-grade agentic AI systems, including autonomous and multi-agent workflows that use reasoning, tool use, planning, memory and orchestration to run complex business processes.
• Set scalable patterns for agent architecture, evaluation, observability, guardrails and human-in-the-loop controls so agents can be deployed safely in production.
• Lead end-to-end design and delivery of advanced ML systems for content intelligence and metadata enrichment, audience modelling and personalization, forecasting, optimization and experimentation, and advertising intelligence and monetization analytics.
• Set technical direction and standards for complex ML work without managing people.
• Build state-of-the-art models, including large-scale recommender systems, time-series and probabilistic forecasting, causal inference, experimentation and uplift models, NLP, generative AI and multimodal systems, and computer vision and video intelligence pipelines.
• Apply rigorous statistics, disciplined experimentation and scientific validation to all solutions, and act as final technical reviewer for high-risk or high-impact ML work.
• Architect production ML systems that integrate with the company's AWS, Snowflake and GCP data ecosystem.
• Define best practices for feature engineering and feature stores, model lifecycle management and MLOps, CI/CD for ML, model monitoring and drift detection, and reproducibility, governance and responsible AI.
• Work closely with data engineering, platform and product engineering teams to deliver scalable, resilient systems.
• Own mission-critical AI solutions for content performance prediction and ratings intelligence, marketing attribution and lifecycle analytics, search, discovery and ranking, ad load optimization and pricing intelligence, and operational forecasting and automation.
• Turn complex model outputs into clear, executive-ready insights that support decisions.
• Advise senior leaders in streaming, content, ad sales, marketing and technology, and explain ML concepts clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Shape enterprise AI roadmaps, architecture decisions and investment priorities through expertise rather than authority.
• Mentor senior and staff data scientists through technical guidance, design reviews and hands-on problem solving, and contribute to internal AI communities of practice, technical forums and standards bodies.

Requirements

• Master's or PhD in computer science, machine learning, data science, statistics, mathematics, operations research or a related field.
• 18, 20 years of total experience, including 13, 15 years in data science or ML with hands-on technical leadership.
• Deep expertise in predictive modelling, optimization and advanced ML techniques.
• Experience with MLOps and deploying models at large scale.
• Working knowledge of modern cloud ecosystems, including AWS, GCP and Snowflake.
• Strong skills in Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SQL and other ML frameworks.
• Experience with experiment design, causal inference and statistical modelling.
• Demonstrated experience in media and entertainment, streaming, digital advertising or consumer intelligence.
• A strong record of delivering enterprise-level impact through AI solutions.
• Exceptional communication skills, including the ability to influence executives and motivate technical teams.
• Preferred: experience developing or customizing large language models or multimodal foundation models.
• Preferred: patents, publications or conference talks on ML or AI.
• Preferred: experience with video intelligence, computer vision for media workflows or content metadata systems.
• Preferred: experience partnering with product and engineering organizations in a fast-paced environment.

Conditions

This is an individual contributor role with no formal people management responsibilities.

Accommodations are available for qualified candidates with disabilities during the application and recruitment process.