Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Spotify • Full-time • New York, NY • 12h ago

The Personalization team at Spotify makes deciding what to play next effortless and enjoyable for every listener. We aim to deeply understand music, podcasts, audiobooks, and videos to deliver exceptional recommendations that keep hundreds of millions of people engaged every day. Our work spans across experiences like Home, Search, curated playlists such as Discover Weekly and Daylist, and new innovations like AI DJ and AI PlaylistsSearch is one of the most important entry points into Spotify’s ecosystem—powering how listeners find and rediscover music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Beyond retrieval, Search drives exploration and discovery, connecting fans with creators in new ways. Building world-class Search means tackling natural language understanding, personalization, and generative AI at massive scale.

Generative AI is also revolutionizing Spotify’s product capabilities and technical infrastructure, with generative recommender systems, agent frameworks, and LLMs opening significant opportunities to meet diverse user needs, expand use cases, and gain richer insights into our content and users.As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Search, you’ll focus on recommender systems modeling at the intersection of generative recommenders and foundational understanding of user taste across music and talk content. You will define and execute the ML technical strategy for Search, building the next generation of Spotify’s recommendation systems, user representations, and supporting technical architecture. Join us and you’ll help millions of users discover and connect with the world’s audio content every day.

What You'll Do

Define and drive the ML technical strategy for Search, focusing on retrieval, ranking, and generative approaches
Build models that improve query understanding, personalization, and relevance across Spotify’s Search experiences
Collaborate with a cross-functional agile team spanning user research, design, data science, product management, and engineering
Prototype and productionize new modeling approaches at scale, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide
Lead high-impact projects from ideation through deployment, setting best practices for ML development, testing, evaluation, and experimentation
Partner with tech leaders and stakeholders to influence priorities and ensure long-term scalability and impact
Stay engaged with the broader ML and Search research community, applying emerging trends to Spotify’s challenges

Who You Are

You have a strong background in machine learning and recommender systems, bridging research and user impact
You have hands-on experience training and operating transformer models in production, or strong interest in doing so
You have production experience developing large-scale ML systems in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages. Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow is a strong plus
You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and leading high-impact projects from start to finish
You’re a systems thinker and strong communicator who can align and influence technical and product stakeholders
You care deeply about agile processes, data-driven development, and reliability
You’re eager to apply emerging ML trends, particularly in LLMs and generative recommenders, to Spotify’s challenges

Where You'll Be

We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North America region as long as we have a work location.
This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.

The United States base range for this position is $215,136- $307,337 plus equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.

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