Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Machine Learning Engineer role stands out because it sits at the intersection of ML systems and a content platform that must operate reliably across multiple media types. In SaaS and platform businesses, content intelligence becomes a shared layer that many product surfaces depend on, and the listing signals work that turns messy, multimodal inputs into consistent, machine-readable signals for downstream use.
From a SaaS career perspective, the emphasis on production ML, evaluation frameworks, and data pipelines points to experience that transfers across subscription products with large catalogs and trust considerations. Building model-driven enrichment and making those signals consumable by other teams is a common scaling challenge in mature SaaS environments, where the leverage comes from reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off models.
The role is best suited to engineers who prefer systems thinking over isolated experimentation and who enjoy connecting model outputs to product-level quality and safety outcomes. It should fit someone comfortable collaborating beyond engineering, since the work explicitly interfaces with product and policy stakeholders and requires translating evolving requirements into dependable, measurable ML services.
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
We design Spotify’s consumer experience - end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration. Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world. That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day. If it touches a consumer, we shape it. We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify.
The Content Platform team powers the full lifecycle of content across music, podcasts, audiobooks, and emerging formats at Spotify. We ensure that everything from licensed catalog to user-generated content is trusted, safe, and high quality for millions of listeners worldwide. Our systems are responsible for how content is ingested, understood, enriched, governed, and distributed across the platform. As the scale and diversity of content continues to grow—driven by advances in AI and new creation tools—we’re building intelligent systems that can evaluate, manage, and route content reliably at global scale.
We’re seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to build and scale foundational ML systems that power content understanding across Spotify. In this role, you’ll work on systems that generate deep, machine-readable understanding of content across audio, video, text, and images—enabling automation, improving quality, and unlocking new product experiences. This work is central to delivering safe, high-quality, and differentiated experiences for millions of listeners and creators worldwide.
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What You Will Do
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Build and scale machine learning systems that generate deep understanding of content across modalities
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Develop models for classification, tagging, semantic understanding, and content enrichment
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Create high quality content enrichment at scale using LLMs and agentic systems.
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Design systems that make content intelligence signals available to downstream teams and products
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Improve automation for content quality, safety, and metadata enrichment at scale
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Collaborate with product, policy, and engineering teams to translate content intelligence into user impact
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Contribute to evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, and annotation systems
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Support rapid experimentation to prototype and launch new types of content signals
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Help improve system reliability, scalability, and performance across large datasets
Who You Are
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You have experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production
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You are comfortable working with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar
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You have experience working with large datasets and care about data quality and evaluation
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You are interested in or have worked with multimodal machine learning
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You understand how to design systems that balance automation with quality and user experience
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You are comfortable working on complex problems with evolving requirements
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You think in systems and understand how models connect to product outcomes
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You communicate clearly and work well across technical and non-technical teams
Where You Will Be
- This role is based in New York, NY
- 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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The United States base range for this position is 227,495–324,993 USD, 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, and paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.
