Staff Machine Learning Engineer, GenRecs

Spotify • New York, NY

222d • $215,136 - $307,337 • Remote

About The Position

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next on Spotify easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like Home and Search, original playlists like Discover Weekly and Daylist, and are at the forefront of new innovations like AI DJ and AI Playlists. Generative AI is transforming Spotify's product capabilities and technical architecture. Generative recommender systems, agent frameworks, and LLMs present huge opportunities for our products to serve more user needs and use cases and unlock richer understanding of our content and users. This Staff Machine Learning Engineer will focus on recommender systems modeling at the intersection of generative recommenders and foundational understanding of user taste across music and talk content formats. You will work closely with a cross-functional team to define and execute the machine learning technical strategy for the product area, building the next generation of Spotify content and user representations and the technical architecture to support it. Join us and you'll keep millions of users listening to great recommendations every day.

Requirements

• Strong background in machine learning and recommender systems, with the ability to bridge research and end-user impact
• Production experience developing large-scale machine learning systems in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages
• Experience with PyTorch, Tensorflow, JAX is a strong plus
• Hands-on experience training and operating transformer models in production settings, or a strong interest in doing so
• Enjoy leading projects from start to finish working closely with your team and peers
• Comfortable dealing with ambiguity on high impact projects
• Strong communicator and systems thinker who can drive alignment and influence across technical and product stakeholders
• Care about agile software processes, data-driven development, reliability, and disciplined experimentation
• Stay current on ML trends and are eager to apply emerging ideas to Spotify's challenges
• Passionate about the opportunity to enrich the listening experience for users around the world

Responsibilities

• Contribute to defining the machine learning technical strategy at the intersection of generative recommenders and foundational user modeling
• Collaborate with a cross functional agile team spanning user research, design, data science, product management, and engineering to build new product features that connect fans and artists in personalized, meaningful ways
• Provide expert technical leadership and direction to accelerate development, ensure scalability and push the boundaries of current methods
• Contribute to designing, building, evaluating, shipping, and refining Spotify's personalization products by hands-on ML development
• Prototype new modeling approaches and productionize solutions at scale for our hundreds of millions of active users
• Promote and role-model best practices of ML model development, testing, evaluation, etc., both inside the team as well as throughout the organization
• Engage with the broader ML community within Spotify and stay current with ML research to inspire and evolve our approaches

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Industry: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees