Director, Machine Learning Engineering - Surfaces Foundation

Spotify’s Surfaces Foundation team builds systems for personalized recommendations for millions of listeners. The Director of Machine Learning Engineering will lead engineering managers and their teams to evolve technical capabilities and ensure efficient platform development.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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