Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Daily Mix to Discover Weekly, we’re behind some of Spotify’s most-loved features. We built them by understanding the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else. Join us and you’ll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them. We ask that our team members be physically located in Central European time or Eastern Standard/Daylight time zones for the purposes of our collaboration hours.

What You'll Do

• Improve the quality of Spotify’s personalized listening recommendations in playlists for our huge number of listeners, across many countries.
• Develop novel models, algorithms and systems for multi-objective multi-stakeholder recommendations in music playlists.
• Implement ongoing monitoring for online model performance on ML and business metrics.
• Collaborate with a multi-functional, agile team, spanning user research, design, data science, product management, and engineering to build new product features that advance our mission to connect artists and fans in personalized and relevant ways
• Drive optimization, testing, and tooling to improve quality
• Be an active contributor to the Spotify group of machine learning practitioners

Who You Are

• You love exploring large datasets to generate hypotheses for improvements. You are comfortable writing SQL queries, doing exploratory analysis, and developing good hypotheses for product improvements.
• You can analyze and improve model performance to improve known metrics. You also want to understand how well those metrics reflect user needs, and can develope new metrics when appropriate.
• You have supplied code and models to large-scale, production recommender systems.
• You understand the architecture and development workflow for large-scale batch and streaming machine-learning systems.
• You have hands-on experience implementing production machine learning systems at scale in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages. Experience with TensorFlow is also a plus.
• You understand a variety of machine learning algorithms, including recommender systems, online bandit models, and learning to rank systems.
• You may have experience with data pipeline tools like Apache Beam, Scio, etc., ML tools like Kubeflow, and cloud platforms like GCP or AWS.
• You are excited about shipping product, agile software processes, reliability, and focused but fast experimentation
• You love your customers even more than your code

Where You'll Be

• We are a distributed workforce enabling our band members to find a work mode that is best for them!
• Where in the world? For this role, it can be within the Americas or EMEA region
• Prefer an office or prefer working from home instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here
• Working hours? We operate within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration. Limited exceptions will be made for other US time zones, Greenwich Mean, and Central European time zones

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.
Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.
Global COVID and Vaccination DisclosureSpotify is committed to safety and well-being of our employees, vendors and clients. We are following regional guidelines mandating vaccination and testing requirements, including those requiring vaccinations and testing for in-person roles and event attendance. For the US, we have mandated that all employees and contractors be fully vaccinated in order to work in our offices and externally with any third-parties. For all other locations, we strongly encourage our employees to get vaccinated and also follow local COVID and safety protocols.