Director of ML Engineering, Spotify
Conversation Product Area
$281.2-401.7k
Plus equity
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$281.2-401.7k
Plus equity
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 are deeply technical, not tech-adjacent. This PA's defining work (a new shared agent runtime and harness, a scaled evaluation system, a voice/speech stack) requires a Director who can evaluate architecture proposals, hold their own in a room with senior ICs, contribute technically in meaningful ways, and make tough tiebreaking and tradeoff calls
- You have run large engineering orgs through platform consolidations, migrations, or evolutions, and you’ve had to earn trust by building highly scaled and functional platform technology
- You have experience with at least two of: LLM-based agent systems and orchestration, evaluation/eval-infrastructure design (including automated judges and regression suites), large-scale retrieval or search systems, or speech/voice ML systems and production voice infrastructure
- You've managed managers, not just individual contributors. You know how to build a management structure that scales
- You have a track record of building strong but nimble teams, with experience restructuring, shifting team resourcing, adjusting to fast changing priorities or shifting needs without losing delivery momentum
What the job involves
- We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the Conversation Product Area
- The Conversation Product Area is the technical center of gravity for the shift to one Agent, building the shared Agent Engine harness and the evaluation infrastructure that supports it
- The Product Area also owns the Search Brain (intent routing and search-driven conversation) the intent-detection and prompt-suggestion platform behind our agentic consumer features like Chat and AI DJ, and the Speak Platform, Spotify's first-party voice team, which spans applied research, production infrastructure, and the character/brand decisions behind every voice Spotify users hear
- This is the engineering org where architecture decisions get made that power every agentic surface at the company
- You'll be working with many of Spotify's senior architects, with product leadership in the consumer AI space, and with cross functional partners. The team needs a leader who is as comfortable making critical architectural calls as they are managing the people making them
- Own engineering execution and technical direction for the Conversation Product Area, including the Agent Engine, the evaluation infrastructure, the Search platform, the AI Voice platform (Speak), and some consumer agentic features built on top of the Agent Engine. This spans production systems at massive scale, applied ML research, and infrastructure that other product areas depend on
- Co-lead the Product Area in a paired product/engineering model. You own engineering and deeply partner with a product counterpart that owns product strategy. You’ll operate as a single leadership unit for planning, prioritization, and external representation. This partnership is core to the success of the role
- You’ll manage a team of ~70 engineers, with a small team of Senior Engineering Managers and Staff/Principal engineers directly reporting to you. You’ll develop and hold accountable the EM layer running the PA's roughly 9 teams. Your leverage comes through your SEMs and Staff engineers, but you’re ultimately accountable for delivery across the entire product area
- Drive the migration of the company’s existing agentic infrastructure onto the shared Agent Engine, in close partnership product teams across the company, balancing migration speed against product teams’ existing roadmap work
- Own the technical strategy for Spotify's first-party voice investment: what Speak builds versus buys, how the team organizes and delivers against a market that's commoditizing fast, and how the character/brand voice decisions for agent experiences get made and shipped on their own aggressive timelines
- Define and hold the technical bar on evaluation. Build the discipline around building feature-specific judges and datasets and product decisions based on those eval sets
- Set and enforce engineering quality standards appropriate to an AI-assisted development era including code review discipline and test coverage especially designed for teams that are increasingly writing code with AI assistance
- Participate as a full member of the broader leadership group, co-developing with your peers and executives the operating model for the whole studio across capacity management, project prioritization, studio communication principles, and building a healthy engineering culture in a highly changeable environment
- Represent the Conversation PA's engineering point of view in high visibility, company-wide architecture and steerco conversations with senior leaders
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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 58 more jobs at Spotify