Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Spotify is a leading audio streaming service that aims to enhance the listening experience for millions of users. The Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer will focus on recommender systems modeling, collaborating with cross-functional teams to define and execute machine learning strategies that enhance personalization across music and podcasts.

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
• Partner closely with teams to translate their needs into foundational systems that enable each step of the core content lifecycle
• Mentor engineers and influence technical strategy by setting high standards in methodology, reproducibility, and collaboration

Requirements:

• You have a strong background in machine learning and recommender systems, and you know how to bridge research and end-user impact
• You have production experience developing large-scale machine learning systems in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages
• Experience with PyTorch, Tensorflow, JAX is a strong plus
• You have hands-on experience training and operating transformer models in production settings, or a strong interest in doing so
• You enjoy leading projects from start to finish working closely with your team and peers
• You are comfortable dealing with ambiguity on high impact projects
• You're a strong communicator and systems thinker who can drive alignment and influence across technical and product stakeholders
• You care about agile software processes, data-driven development, reliability, and disciplined experimentation
• You stay current on ML trends and are eager to apply emerging ideas to Spotify's challenges
• You're passionate about the opportunity to enrich the listening experience for users around the world
• You have extensive experience in designing system architectures that include machine learning models as key components in enabling the product experiences
• You have a strong bias to action by building MVPs, prototypes and illustrating ideas through concise documents to drive initiatives forward
• Team-first approach with developed techniques to ensure teams are happy, motivated, and productive
• Accountable to senior tech leadership for meeting our product and technology objectives and managing expectations if those are at risk
• Demonstrated success leading technical initiatives and shaping strategic directions through cross-functional collaboration
• Excellent communication skills and stakeholder management abilities; comfortable operating at the intersection of science and engineering