Data Scientist II - Trust & Safety

Spotify•Boston, MA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Platform team creates the technology that enables Spotify to learn quickly and scale easily, enabling rapid growth in our users and our business around the globe. Spanning many disciplines, we work to make the business work; creating the infrastructure, tooling, frameworks, and capabilities needed to welcome a billion customers. Spotify is seeking a Data Scientist II to join Product Trust Insights (PTI) within Trust & Safety. PTI accelerates Spotify innovation by providing safety research, risk measurement, and evidence-based recommendations that enable R&D teams to confidently expand into new products, markets, and technologies. PTI's research informs how Spotify designs, launches, and improves features across the platform, with a particular focus on AI-powered experiences, recommendations, social and messaging surfaces, and the safety needs of younger users. Our work helps product teams understand where risks concentrate, which user segments are most affected, and which interventions improve outcomes. We aim to keep safety upstream of moderation by shaping product design before launch and measuring how features perform once they reach users.

Requirements

3+ years of experience leading data science or research projects with a focus on safety, integrity, responsible AI, fairness, or a related domain
Experienced with SQL and Python and are comfortable working across quantitative and qualitative evidence
Hands-on familiarity with modern AI and machine learning systems, including recommendation systems and large language models, and understand how risks emerge from system design
Comfortable scoping ambiguous problems, including early-stage or zero-to-one research areas, and prioritizing them in a fast-moving environment
Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences, including explaining methodological choices to policy partners and leadership
Care about turning research into practice and are comfortable making concrete, evidence-based recommendations
Bring a thoughtful perspective on responsible product innovation and how to measure and improve platform safety

Responsibilities

Lead end-to-end research and measurement projects that evaluate the safety of new and existing features, from scoping through delivery of actionable recommendations
Design and generate data for product risk assessments, stress tests, and evaluation of AI-powered features, including generative and agentic experiences
Develop longitudinal trust and safety metrics and use them to evaluate the effectiveness of product interventions over time
Translate complex research findings into clear narratives, tools, and recommendations for product, policy, and leadership audiences
Partner with product safety specialists, policy advisors, product leads, and engineering counterparts to ensure product launches reflect user safety needs and support thoughtful, “no regrets” design
Build and improve evaluation methods, including LLM-based evaluation approaches, behavioral instrumentation, and measurement frameworks in collaboration with data scientists and engineers
Work closely with product managers, designers, engineers, policy specialists, researchers, and other data scientists. Your work will help inform decisions that often involve senior leadership.