Machine Learning Engineer, Deezer
Music Search Engine Internship
Office located in Rue de Calais, Paris
Audio streaming platform
Open for applications
Audio streaming platform
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
Office located in Rue de Calais, Paris
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Deezer's mission is to bring audiences and artists together by embodying the thrill, intimacy, and delight of music discovery.
Role
Who you are
- Master’s student in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
- Solid understanding of natural language processing and machine learning and good coding skills in Python
- Familiarity with LLMs (e.g., Transformers, OpenAI models) and retrieval techniques (e.g., Elasticsearch, FAISS) is a strong plus
- Knowledge of cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP) is a plus
- Interest in user-centric search and recommendation systems
- Curiosity, autonomy, and a hands-on approach to prototyping and experimentation
What the job involves
- On a music streaming platform, the search engine plays a central role in helping users access and discover content
- While many users search with a clear intent—such as playing a specific song or artist—others use search in a more exploratory way, looking for new or personalized content through open-ended queries like “chill indie vibes” or “road trip songs from the 2000s.”
- Traditional search engines, which rely on lexical or semantic matching, often struggle with this kind of exploratory intent
- Recommender systems can help but are not always designed to handle complex, free-form queries
- This is where Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic technologies come in: they can interpret nuanced user intent and decide how to best retrieve relevant content by dynamically combining search, recommendation, and other retrieval strategies
- The internship has a start date in October and the goal is to explore how these agentic approaches—powered by LLMs—can be applied to improve exploratory search on a music platform
- You will help design and prototype an intelligent system that understands user queries and routes them to the most appropriate back-end services (e.g. , search index, recommender, curated playlists)
- Investigate and evaluate recent research on agent-based and LLM-powered search systems
- Analyze the specific needs of a music-focused search engine, which differs from general-purpose search
- Design and implement a prototype that interprets complex user queries and delivers personalized music results
- Work with real-world usage data from the Deezer platform
- Optionally experiment with fine-tuning or prompt-engineering LLMs for better performance
- Contribute to system evaluation and discuss the path toward scaling and production deployment
Our take
Deezer is a listening app that lets users stream music, podcasts, and radio stations from multiple devices, also offering recommendations and smart playlists. This makes it a competitor of a giant in the sector, Spotify. While Deezer and Spotify are comparable in many respects such as interface, content music discovery features and pricing, Deezer currently has an edge in sound quality. However, it lacks the paying customer base of Spotify - while it has a healthy 16 million paid subscribers, Spotify is roughly ten times larger.
Neither company specialises in terms of media or region, so it’s hard to see how Deezer could carve itself out a distinct niche, and it risks falling behind in integrations with third-party platforms due to its relatively small market share. A major data breach of customer information in 2022 was badly handled, which won't help matters.
There is, however, an outside chance that Spotify could fall victim to their own success, having come under fire in recent years for its poor relationships with the artists on its platform. With a solid platform and considerable funding from a SPAC IPO Placement in 2022, Deezer may find itself in a position to pick up some of the windfall customers from fans dissatisfied with Spotify's response to this and other issues swirling around the giant.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Aug 2018
$186.6m
LATE VC
Jan 2016
$116.6m
SERIES E
Total funding: $551.3m
Company benefits
- Start-up environment and philosophy
- Highly motivated and product-focused people ready to drive innovation
- In-house Deezer Sessions with your favourite artists, gig tickets
- Hackathons & meetups
- Friday drinks, summer and winter parties
- A stocked kitchen with free drinks and snacks
- Areas to relax and collaborate with beanbags, guitars and table football
- An ‘at home’ vibe, with great outdoor spaces
- Gym access, with lunch-time yoga, pilates and thai boxing classes
- A Deezer premium family account for free
- Allowance for sports, travelling and culture
- Meal vouchers
Company HQ
Saint-Georges, Paris, France
Leadership
Jeronimo Folgueira
(CEO)Previously MD at Paddy Power Betfair, who went on to serve as CEO at Affinitas and then Spark Networks.
Salary benchmarks
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