Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Personalization is a core SaaS capability where product value is delivered through continuously improving relevance, discovery, and retention. This Research Scientist role sits directly in that loop, focusing on how generative AI can be integrated into recommender systems at global scale. In a subscription platform with large, diverse audiences, the technical challenge is not only model quality, but also how those models behave across contexts, objectives, and user segments.
For a SaaS career, the role offers durable leverage: designing experiments, building evaluation frameworks, and translating research into measurable product impact are skills that travel across consumer and B2B SaaS alike. Work that spans data collection, modeling, and scalable evaluation mirrors how modern SaaS organizations operationalize machine learning—where iteration speed, deployment constraints, and multi-metric optimization shape what “state of the art” means in production.
This position tends to fit researchers who want their work to be both publishable and product-connected, and who are comfortable collaborating across engineering, product, design, and analytics. It also suits scientists motivated by long-horizon roadmaps, where success depends on rigorous methodology and an ability to navigate trade-offs between novelty, reliability, and user experience outcomes.
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
Spotify has more than 600M listeners in more than 180 markets around the world, who use our music, podcast, and audiobook services to find what delights, entertains, educates, and informs them. Personalization is a high impact organization that provides the technology to serve them what they expect to find, to help them explore and find new things to enjoy, and to suggest things they might not be aware of that they would like.
We are looking for a Research Scientist with a machine learning background to help us improve personalization experiences by integrating and optimizing state-of-the-art generative AI technologies into our recommender systems. You will join a team of machine learning researchers whose focus is on innovating the Spotify experience through researching and developing technologies that power intelligent user experiences for long-term satisfaction.
You will be part of an interdisciplinary team focusing on ensuring that the foundations of Spotify technologies are at or above the state of the art and, in the process, redefine the state of the art for the field and contributing to the wider research community by publishing papers. Our team has strong ties internally to product groups as well as externally to the research community.
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What You'll Do- Participate in groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence and machine learning with a focus on large-scale solutions to optimize recommender systems.
- Apply your scientific knowledge to analyze and collect data, perform analyses, conduct experiments and identify problems, as well as devise solutions through hands-on development.
- Work on practical applications such as recommendations and scalable evaluations.
- Work in collaboration with other scientists, engineers, product managers, designers, user researchers, and analysts across Spotify to design creative solutions to challenging problems.
- You'll have product impact, while working on and further developing a long-term research roadmap.
- You will maintain a research profile through external engagement such as publishing, giving talks, and being an active community member at top conferences.
Who You Are- You have a Masters or PhD in machine learning, data science, or related areas or are enrolled in an advanced degree program.
- Demonstrated expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence through peer-reviewed publications at conferences (such as NeurIPS, KDD, RecSys or related)
- A solid understanding or past research experience on recommender systems and ability to optimize Generative AI models for new targets, rewards or multiple objectives.
- Solid hands-on skills in implementing advanced algorithms, as well as sourcing, cleaning, analyzing and modeling of large-scale real data.
- You're a creative problem-solver who is passionate about digging into complex problems and devising new approaches to reach results.
Where You'll Be- This role is based in London.
- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home
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Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.
At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know - we’re here to support you in any way we can.
Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.
