Remote opportunity at
SpotifyStaff Machine Learning Engineer, Home Surfaces
Spotify seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Surfaces Moments team within the Personalization Mission. The employer builds applications that help listeners discover and…
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About This Role
Spotify seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Surfaces Moments team within the Personalization Mission. The employer builds applications that help listeners discover and connect with audio content, including Discover Weekly, Blend, and the Home feed experience. In this position, the selected professional will shape personalized discovery by combining recommendation systems, product design, and large language models at a global scale. The role focuses on taking models from…
Job Description
Spotify seeks a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Surfaces Moments team within the Personalization Mission. The employer builds applications that help listeners discover and connect with audio content, including Discover Weekly, Blend, and the Home feed experience. In this position, the selected professional will shape personalized discovery by combining recommendation systems, product design, and large language models at a global scale. The role focuses on taking models from research into production, navigating ambiguous problem areas, and establishing technical direction for recommendation architectures.
This opportunity suits an experienced machine learning specialist who enjoys scaling production systems, building content recommendation tools, and mentoring engineering peers. The professional will collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, designers, and fellow engineers to execute experimentation strategies and enhance recommendation relevance.
The position is open to individuals located in the North Americas region where Spotify maintains an office, with collaboration centered in the Eastern Standard time zone. Employees have the flexibility to work remotely within these guidelines.
Responsibilities
- Manage and enhance the machine learning models and systems that support the Home feed and Shortcuts features.
- Develop and deploy personalized recommendations for global listeners.
- Create content recommendation systems intended for agentic and AI-powered user interfaces.
- Train, evaluate, fine-tune, and optimize large language models via parameter-efficient techniques, SFT, and distillation.
- Partner with cross-functional teammates including product managers, data scientists, designers, and engineers to plan and run experimentation strategies.
- Oversee A/B testing, model evaluation, monitoring, and ongoing optimization of recommendation cost efficiency, reliability, and quality.
- Enhance machine learning platform features, production architectures, and data pipelines.
- Contribute to the long-term architecture of personalization systems and guide technical decisions in ambiguous areas.
- Support and mentor other machine learning engineers to elevate team performance.
Requirements
- Have at least 8 years of professional experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production settings.
- Demonstrate deep expertise in ranking models, recommendation systems, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms.
- Possess strong proficiency in Python alongside practical experience building machine learning systems with PyTorch.
- Bring background in large language model evaluation, training, fine-tuning, and optimization methods such as LoRA, SFT, and distillation.
- Show experience working with large-scale inference systems while addressing cost, reliability, and latency challenges.
- Know how to design, execute, and interpret online experiments and A/B tests.
- Have experience operating distributed machine learning workloads using frameworks like Ray, FSDP, or HSDP.
- Demonstrate experience building and maintaining orchestration workflows and data pipelines with tools such as Airflow, Flyte, BigQuery, and cloud storage platforms.
Core Skills
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Six months of paid parental leave
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Monthly meal allowance
- 23 paid days off
- 13 paid flexible holidays
- Paid sick leave
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the employment type for this role?
This is a full-time position.
What is the location and remote work policy?
The position is remote-friendly, allowing candidates to work within the North Americas region where Spotify has a work location, though the team operates in the Eastern Standard time zone.
What is the salary range for this position?
The United States base salary range is $227,495 to $324,993, with additional equity provided.
How many years of experience are required?
Candidates must have 8 or more years of experience building and deploying production machine learning systems.
Sample Interview Questions
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