Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role sits in a mature, large-scale SaaS-like environment where product experience is tightly coupled to platform reliability and iteration speed. The Surfaces Foundation remit spans targeting, serving, and evaluation for personalized recommendations, placing the work at a core junction of machine learning infrastructure and end-user surfaces. For SaaS professionals, that combination is notable because it treats ML not as a side capability, but as a shared platform that multiple squads depend on.
Long-term, the position builds credibility in the kind of platform thinking that translates across modern SaaS organisations: deciding what becomes a reusable capability, evolving systems incrementally, and balancing autonomy for product teams with a coherent foundation. It also offers exposure to cross-functional alignment with product, data science, and engineering leadership, plus the operational realities of keeping ML systems dependable in production while tooling and practices change.
The role best fits an experienced engineering leader who enjoys operating at the boundary between strategy and hands-on technical decision-making. It will suit someone comfortable guiding other leaders, navigating trade-offs across teams with different priorities, and shaping how AI-assisted development is adopted in day-to-day engineering work.
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’s Surfaces Foundation team builds the systems that power how personalized recommendations show up for hundreds of millions of listeners. From targeting and configuration to serving and evaluation, this team sits at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure and product experience. You’ll lead a group shaping how AI-driven recommendations evolve across every Spotify surface, helping teams move faster while keeping a strong, shared foundation.
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What You'll Do
- Lead and support engineering managers and their teams building platform systems for personalized recommendations across Spotify
- Set and evolve the technical vision for foundational capabilities, including targeting, serving, evaluation, and agent-driven systems
- Make thoughtful decisions about what should become platform capabilities, ensuring teams can move quickly without unnecessary complexity
- Guide incremental platform evolution, enabling continuous delivery rather than large, disruptive rewrites
- Partner closely with product, data science, and engineering leaders to align priorities across multiple squads
- Stay close to the technology when needed, contributing to architecture decisions and resolving complex production challenges
- Encourage adoption of AI-assisted development tools and shape how teams use them effectively in day-to-day work
- Hire, develop, and grow engineering leaders and individual contributors, building a strong and inclusive team culture
Who You Are
- You have experience building and operating machine learning systems at scale in consumer-facing products
- You have worked on recommendation systems, ranking, or content delivery platforms and understand end-to-end ML workflows
- You bring strong platform thinking, with the ability to decide when to build shared capabilities and when to keep solutions closer to product teams
- You are comfortable working with modern AI tools and understand how they influence software development practices
- You have led teams through change, supporting adoption of new technologies or ways of working
- You collaborate effectively across disciplines and help create alignment across teams with different priorities
- You care about building inclusive, supportive team environments and invest in the growth of others
- You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term impact
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
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The United States base range for this position is $281,196 - $401,709 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.
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.
