Remote opportunity at
SpotifyStaff Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization
Spotify is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Personalization mission within the Surfaces Moments team. This group develops moment-based features and underlying intelligence…
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AI Summary
As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer on Spotify's Surfaces Moments team, you will architect and deploy production-scale recommendation algorithms, LLM applications, and ML infrastructure powering key interface features like Home Shortcuts. Day-to-day, you will translate research into scalable production systems while working cross-functionally with product, data science, and design teams to improve discovery features and cost efficiency.
About This Role
Spotify is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Personalization mission within the Surfaces Moments team. This group develops moment-based features and underlying intelligence for Spotify interfaces, such as the Home Shortcuts experience, aiming to connect listeners with audio content rapidly. The position involves working at the intersection of production-scale machine learning infrastructure, large language models, and recommendation systems to shape future discovery features. This opportunity is well-suited…
Job Description
Spotify is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Personalization mission within the Surfaces Moments team. This group develops moment-based features and underlying intelligence for Spotify interfaces, such as the Home Shortcuts experience, aiming to connect listeners with audio content rapidly. The position involves working at the intersection of production-scale machine learning infrastructure, large language models, and recommendation systems to shape future discovery features.
This opportunity is well-suited for a technical professional who excels at taking models from research to production, navigating ambiguous problem spaces, and solving large-scale personalization hurdles. Team members collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, designers, and fellow engineers to drive experimentation strategies and enhance recommendation quality, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
Spotify operates as an equal opportunity employer that values inclusivity and welcomes applicants regardless of background. The position provides the flexibility to work remotely within the North Americas region where a work location exists, with the team operating on the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration purposes.
Responsibilities
- Manage and enhance machine learning systems and models powering the Home feed and Shortcuts feature
- Design, construct, and release personalized recommendations for a global audience of listeners
- Develop content recommendation platforms supporting emerging agentic and AI-powered experiences
- Train, optimize, fine-tune, and evaluate large language models using methods like SFT, distillation, and parameter-efficient techniques
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners including product managers, designers, engineers, and data scientists to establish experimentation strategies
- Oversee A/B testing, continuous optimization, model evaluation, and monitoring for cost efficiency, reliability, and recommendation quality
- Enhance machine learning platform features, production architectures, and data pipelines
- Provide technical leadership in unclear problem areas and contribute to long-term architectural design for personalization systems
- Coach and guide other machine learning engineers to elevate team standards
Requirements
- Possess eight or more years of professional background creating and implementing machine learning systems in live production environments
- Demonstrate deep knowledge in personalization, ranking models, recommendation systems, or large-scale content discovery platforms
- Show strong proficiency in Python and practical experience developing machine learning solutions with PyTorch
- Bring familiarity with large language model optimization, evaluation, training, and fine-tuning techniques including LoRA, SFT, and distillation
- Understand the performance complexities of latency, cost optimization, and reliability within large-scale inference systems
- Know how to interpret, design, and execute online experiments and A/B tests
- Hold experience operating distributed machine learning workloads using frameworks such as Ray, FSDP, or HSDP
- Have hands-on capability building and maintaining orchestration workflows and data pipelines utilizing cloud-based storage platforms, Airflow, Flyte, and BigQuery
- Reside within the North Americas region in an area with an established work location
Core Skills
Benefits
- United States base salary ranging from $227,495 to $324,993
- Equity compensation
- Health insurance coverage
- Six months of paid parental leave
- 401(k) retirement plan access
- Monthly meal allowance
- 23 paid days off
- 13 paid flexible holidays
- Paid sick leave
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the salary range for the Staff Machine Learning Engineer position?
The United States base salary range for this role is between $227,495 and $324,993, accompanied by equity.
Is this position remote?
Yes, this role offers remote flexibility within the North Americas region where Spotify has a work location, though the team operates on the Eastern Standard time zone.
How many years of experience are required to apply?
Candidates must have eight or more years of experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production settings.
What benefits are provided with this job?
Offered benefits include health insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, six months of paid parental leave, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, paid sick leave, and a monthly meal allowance.
Role DNA
This role combines high technical complexity and senior-level autonomy with strong cross-functional collaboration requirements to solve ambiguous, large-scale personalization challenges.
Salary Analysis
While salary was not disclosed in the posting, base pay for a Staff ML Engineer at a major tech company like Spotify typically ranges from $210,000 to $285,000 in the U.S. market, exclusive of equity and bonuses.
Employer-Listed Salary
Not disclosed
As stated in this job posting.
Jobsiz Platform Estimate
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