Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Talk, Personalization

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend 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.
We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join our team that is working on applying both brand new, tried and tested solutions to ensure a safe and enjoyable personalized listening experience on Spotify.
You will be working with a multi-disciplinary team, who's driving the creation of a platform for understanding our talk audio content and our listeners in a deep way, ultimately establishing Spotify’s talk audio programming brand as one that users love and trust.
You will not only coordinate and influence the direction within the team but also collaborate with multiple stakeholders working on personalization projects for talk audio across Spotify! This is a unique opportunity to revolutionize talk audio recommendation by building an intentional knowledge platform with rich content and user understanding and safety at its core, allowing us to inspire creators and enrich every moment for every listener.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to designing, building, evaluating, shipping, and refining Spotify’s personalization products by hands-on ML development
• Collaborate with a multi-functional agile team spanning data engineers, applied ML engineers, software engineers, data/content analysts, research scientists, user researchers, designers, and product managers to build new product features that advance our mission to connect artists and fans in personalized and relevant ways
• Prototype innovative approaches and productionize solutions at scale for our hundreds of millions of active users
• Promote and role-model standard processes of ML model development, testing, evaluation, etc. both inside the team as well as throughout the organization
• Demonstrate code consistency, performance, robustness, and scalability
• Perform data analysis to establish baselines to advise product decisions
• Drive optimization, testing, and tooling development to improve quality
• Join an active group of machine learning practitioners across Spotify

Who You Are

• You have an MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or equivalent
• You have 5+ years of professional engineering experience working in a product-driven environment implementing machine learning systems at scale in Java, Scala, Python, C++, or similar languages, with experience with TensorFlow and the TensorFlow ecosystem (TFX) a big plus
• You have a strong background in machine learning theory and practice, with production experience with ML algorithms for ranking and recommendation systems
• You have experience with building data pipelines and getting the data you need to implement and evaluate your models using tools like Apache Beam / Spark
• You are passionate about agile software processes, data-driven development, reliability, and focused experimentation
• You routinely survey research publications in the machine learning and software engineering communities
• You have excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate with team members across all job functions
• 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 region in which we have a work location and is within working hours
• Working hours? We operate within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration and ask that all be located that time zone
• Prefer an office to work from instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here

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.