Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Spotify
Zeitgeist, Personalization
More information about location
Commercial music streaming service
Posted today
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Posted today
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
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 opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it
Role
Who you are
- You have 5+ years of experience building and shipping machine learning models end-to-end
- You have a strong foundation in Python (Java and Scala are a plus) and experienced with GCP tools (e.g. Dataflow, BigQuery)
- You have hands-on experience with LLMs and agent orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic), building tool-calling agents, RAG, and vector databases
- You have built and shipped production-scale, data-driven AI/ML systems, ideally in content understanding, knowledge graphs, NLP, MIR, or related domains
- You are excited but not overhyped by the potential of Generative AI
- You're comfortable operating as a 0-to-1 builder — you thrive in ambiguous, exploratory spaces and can move from idea to experimentation to production with confidence
- You care about building inclusive, user-centric products, and you think about AI and ML in the context of products and user impact, not just tech
- You have worked effectively in collaborative, cross-functional environments
- You care deeply about code quality, reliability, and scalability
What the job involves
- 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, podcasts, and listeners better than anyone else and by leveraging the latest in Generative AI. Join us and you’ll give millions of listeners great music and talk experiences, personalized to each and every one of them
- The AI Foundation team within Personalization provides the state-of-the-art foundational data and tech with which we are inventing and shipping new interactive, personalized listening experiences. This is a team of about a hundred AI/ML Engineers, Applied Research Scientists, Product Managers, and domain experts
- You’ll join the Zeitgeist squad within the AI Foundation team. We focus on building the systems and models that help Spotify understand culture in real time—what’s trending, why it matters, and how it shapes listening
- You’ll leverage large language models and agentic workflows, and work closely with engineers, data scientists, and product partners to turn signals into meaningful user experiences. This is an exciting mix of platform-level content understanding and experience-level user presentation
- Design, build, and ship agentic systems that ground personalized listening experiences in cultural context and world knowledge, used by hundreds of millions of Spotify users
- Develop and maintain pipelines for extracting, structuring, and serving cultural signals at scale, leveraging LLMs and agentic workflows
- Partner closely with teams across Personalization to integrate foundational cultural data and tech into new agentic listening experiences
- Own components end-to-end — from data pipelines and model training to production serving and monitoring
- Design and build evaluation tooling (including LLM-as-judge frameworks and dataset analysis), and run experiments to evaluate the impact of cultural context signals on user experience and engagement
- Help define the technical direction of the squad, contributing to architecture decisions, and shaping what building "0-to-1" experiences looks like in practice
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Spotify was founded in an attempt to combat the rampant music piracy that was causing significant harm to the industry. The company has since taken music streaming mainstream and now has 180m+ paying subscribers across the world.
With features that include a highly accessible interface and a vast catalogue of artists, Spotify's strong brand has been able to maintain growth in spite of fierce competition from deep-pocketed rivals like Amazon and Apple. The company has achieved this by making smart acquisitions to move into other verticals to strengthen its offerings, especially podcasting, by acquiring Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.
Spotify's future plans include rapid growth with a goal to become a one-stop destination for all digital sound, as well as AI and NFT integrations. However, high costs incurred from the acquisition of exclusive podcasts, increasing competitor strength, and weak bottom-line growth mean that the company must find a balance to maintain its position in the sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Jan 2016
$1bn
CONVERTIBLE
Jun 2015
$526m
SERIES G
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company benefits
- Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse
- Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success
- Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents
- All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub
- Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs
Company HQ
Norrmalm, Stockholm, Stockholms län
Leadership
Daniel Ek
(CEO & Chairman)Founded Spotify in 2006. Previously worked as an executive at Tradera, an auction company that was sold to eBay and was briefly the CEO of uTorrent.
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