Data Scientist II - Trust & Safety

About the Team

The Platform team builds the technology that allows Spotify to learn and scale efficiently, supporting rapid global growth in users and business. We work across many disciplines to ensure the business runs smoothly, creating the necessary infrastructure, tooling, frameworks, and capabilities to serve a billion customers.

Spotify is looking for a Data Scientist II to join the Product Trust Insights (PTI) team within Trust & Safety. PTI drives Spotify's innovation by conducting safety research, measuring risks, and providing evidence-based recommendations. This empowers R&D teams to confidently explore new products, markets, and technologies.

PTI's research influences Spotify's design, launch, and improvement of platform features, with a special emphasis on AI-driven experiences, recommendations, social and messaging features, and the safety requirements of younger users. Our work assists product teams in identifying areas of risk concentration, understanding affected user segments, and determining which interventions yield better outcomes.

Our goal is to proactively address safety by influencing product design before launch and measuring feature performance once they are live.

What You'll Do

• Lead comprehensive research and measurement projects to assess the safety of new and existing features, from initial scoping to delivering actionable recommendations.
• Design and generate data for product risk assessments, stress tests, and evaluations of AI-powered features, including generative and agentic experiences.
• Develop and utilize longitudinal trust and safety metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of product interventions over time.
• Communicate complex research findings into clear narratives, tools, and recommendations for product, policy, and leadership audiences.
• Collaborate with product safety specialists, policy advisors, product leads, and engineering counterparts to ensure product launches prioritize user safety and support thoughtful, "no regrets" design.
• Enhance and build evaluation methods, including LLM-based evaluation approaches, behavioral instrumentation, and measurement frameworks, in partnership with data scientists and engineers.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, engineers, policy specialists, researchers, and fellow data scientists. Your contributions will inform decisions involving senior leadership.

Who You Are

• Possess at least 3 years of experience leading data science or research projects focused on safety, integrity, responsible AI, fairness, or a related field.
• Proficient in SQL and Python, comfortable working with both quantitative and qualitative data.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI and machine learning systems, including recommendation systems and large language models, with an understanding of how risks arise from system design.
• Skilled in scoping ambiguous problems, including early-stage or "zero-to-one" research areas, and prioritizing them in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication skills, able to convey information clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including explaining methodological choices to policy partners and leadership.
• Passionate about translating research into practical applications and comfortable making concrete, evidence-based recommendations.
• Bring a considered perspective on responsible product innovation and methods for measuring and improving platform safety.

Where You'll Be

• This position is based in New York or Boston.
• We offer workplace flexibility, allowing you to work where you perform best. While some in-person meetings are required, we maintain flexibility for remote work.
• This team collaborates within the Eastern Standard time zone.

Compensation and Benefits

The United States base salary range for this position is $117,000 - $167,000 USD, plus equity. Available benefits include health insurance, six months of paid parental leave, a 401(k) retirement plan, a monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, paid flexible holidays, and paid sick leave. These ranges are subject to change.

AI in Hiring

Spotify may utilize AI tools to assist in the hiring process, such as reviewing applications or analyzing resumes. These tools support our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. All final hiring decisions are made by humans. For more information on data processing, please contact us. Learn more about our AI notice here: https://lifeatspotify.com/ai-notice

About Spotify

Today, we are the world's most popular audio streaming subscription service.