Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Spotify’s Personalization group sits at the intersection of large-scale consumer SaaS and applied machine learning, where recommendation quality directly influences retention and engagement. This ML Engineering Manager role is notable because it focuses on taking AI-driven product ideas—spanning surfaces like Home and Search—through the full lifecycle, from experimentation to production, with an emphasis on agentic reasoning and orchestration rather than isolated models.
From a SaaS career perspective, the position offers durable experience in running ML systems that operate under real-world constraints: latency, reliability, iteration cadence, and measurable user impact. Leading a mixed squad of ML, backend, and data engineers also builds the cross-disciplinary management toolkit that modern SaaS organizations rely on when ML is embedded in product experiences, not treated as a research function. The remit includes aligning technical strategy with senior leaders and scaling prototypes into stable capabilities.
This role fits an engineering leader who enjoys ambiguity, can translate platform-level direction into pragmatic execution, and is comfortable guiding both architectural choices and hands-on modeling and coding trade-offs. It will particularly suit someone motivated by people leadership—hiring, coaching, and mentoring—while staying close to the technical details of consumer-facing ML delivery.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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 Playlists.
As an ML Engineering Manager, you will provide technical leadership to a squad of engineers focusing on exciting new AI-driven experiences. In collaboration with a cross-functional and cross-team leadership group, you will help shape the future of Spotfiy’s agentic reasoning and orchestration tech stack. Join us and you’ll help millions of users discover and connect with the world’s audio content every day.
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What You'll Do- Lead a talented team of ML, backend, and data engineers to build and launch innovative AI-driven personalized experiences
- Debate and align technical strategies with senior engineering leaders and partner teams, translate these strategies clearly back to your squad, and actively guide architectural vision and day-to-day ML modeling and coding decisions
- Navigate ambiguity, driving innovation through rapid prototyping and iterative development in cross-functional teams
- Champion AI-assisted coding practices, continually expanding the team's technical capabilities
- Foster strong research partnerships to scale innovative solutions from experimentation to production
- Develop and grow your team's talent through hiring, coaching, mentoring, and fostering a collaborative, adaptive culture
Who You Are- You have experience leading delivery of consumer-facing ML products at scaleYou are energized by rapid change, ambiguity, and opportunity, with a proven track record transforming innovative ideas into impactful products
- You are excited but not overhyped by the potential of Generative AI and agent technologies
- You are comfortable providing detailed technical direction and resolving complex engineering challenges
- You thrive when developing great people and phenomenal, meaningful products
- You have experience in cultivating a strong engineering culture in an agile environment
- You have experience in people management, with the humility to realize where you’re still growing
Where You'll Be- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the EST time zone as long as we have a work location.
- The squad is based in New York City. This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.
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The United States base range for this position is $176,166- $251,666 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.
