Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Spotify
Policy & Safety
$227.5-325k
+ Equity
More information about location
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$227.5-325k
+ Equity
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 experience building and shipping production-grade machine learning systems at scale
- You have strong expertise in ML evaluation, including dataset design, metrics, and model performance monitoring
- You have worked with multimodal machine learning systems across text, audio, image, or video domains
- You are experienced with human-in-the-loop systems, active learning, or feedback-driven model improvement
- You are comfortable translating complex requirements into technical solutions, including regulatory or policy constraints
- You have experience working across teams and influencing technical direction in large-scale systems
- You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and making thoughtful decisions that balance speed, quality, and risk
- You communicate clearly and collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
What the job involves
- The Policy & Safety team sits within the Content Platform domain and builds the systems that keep Spotify safe and trustworthy at scale. We own the infrastructure behind content moderation, including detection models, policy enforcement systems, compliance pipelines, and the safety-by-default platform
- Our work sits on the critical path of every new content type and product experience—from messaging and comments to collaborative and agentic features. We partner closely with Trust & Safety, Legal, and Public Affairs to ensure that as Spotify evolves, safety is built in from the start—not added later
- Build and scale machine learning systems for proactive content detection, classification, and pre-publish safety scanning
- Design and implement policy evaluation frameworks, including standardized datasets, offline and online metrics, and continuous improvement loops
- Develop multimodal models that combine text, audio, image, and video signals for safety and policy enforcement
- Architect feedback loops that turn human reviewer input into structured training data for continuous model improvement
- Translate regulatory requirements (e.g., precision/recall obligations, compliance reporting) into scalable ML system designs
- Partner with cross-functional teams across Trust & Safety, Legal, Public Affairs, and Product to deliver safe user experiences
- Drive technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces and contribute to long-term platform architecture
- Mentor and support other machine learning engineers, helping raise the bar across the team
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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