Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Zeitgeist, Personalization

About the Role

The Personalization team at Spotify aims to enhance the music and podcast listening experience by making song and show recommendations easier and more enjoyable. We are responsible for beloved features like Blend and Discover Weekly, driven by a deep understanding of music, podcasts, listeners, and the latest advancements in Generative AI. Join us to deliver personalized audio experiences to millions of listeners worldwide.

The AI Foundation team within Personalization provides cutting-edge data and technology for inventing and deploying new interactive, personalized listening experiences. This multidisciplinary team comprises approximately 100 AI/ML Engineers, Applied Research Scientists, Product Managers, and domain experts.

As part of the Zeitgeist squad within AI Foundation, you will focus on developing systems and models that enable Spotify to understand real-time cultural trends, their significance, and their impact on listening habits. You will utilize large language models and agentic workflows, collaborating closely with engineers, data scientists, and product partners to transform signals into meaningful user experiences. This role involves a blend of platform-level content understanding and user-facing experience development.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and deploy agentic systems that anchor personalized listening experiences in cultural context and world knowledge, impacting hundreds of millions of Spotify users.
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for extracting, structuring, and serving cultural signals, employing LLMs and agentic workflows.
• Collaborate with various teams across Personalization to integrate foundational cultural data and technology into new agentic listening experiences.
• Take ownership of components end-to-end, including data pipelines, model training, production serving, and monitoring.
• Design and build evaluation tools, such as LLM-as-judge frameworks and dataset analysis tools, and conduct experiments to assess the impact of cultural context signals on user experience and engagement.
• Contribute to the squad's technical direction, participate in architecture decisions, and help define the process of building "0-to-1" experiences.

Who You Are

• Possess 5 years of experience in building and deploying machine learning models end-to-end.
• Strong proficiency in Python (Java and Scala are advantageous) and experience with GCP tools like Dataflow and BigQuery.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic), including building tool-calling agents, RAG, and vector databases.
• Proven experience in building and deploying production-scale, data-driven AI/ML systems, preferably in content understanding, knowledge graphs, NLP, MIR, or related fields.
• Enthusiastic about the potential of Generative AI, with a balanced perspective.
• Comfortable operating as a "0-to-1" builder, thriving in ambiguous and exploratory environments, and capable of moving confidently from idea to production.
• Committed to building inclusive, user-centric products, with a focus on the product and user impact of AI/ML, not just the technology.
• Experience working effectively in collaborative, cross-functional teams.
• Strong dedication to code quality, reliability, and scalability.

Where You'll Be

• This role is based in New York.
• We offer flexibility in your work location, with some in-person meetings required, but ample flexibility to work from home.

Compensation and Benefits

• The United States base salary range for this position is $184,050 - $262,928, plus equity.
• Benefits include health insurance, six months of paid parental leave, a 401(k) retirement plan, a monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, and paid sick leave.
• These salary ranges are subject to future modifications.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We welcome individuals from all backgrounds, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or any other characteristic. We believe that a diverse workforce drives innovation and success. We encourage you to bring your unique experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds to Spotify.

Accessibility

We are dedicated to ensuring our recruitment process is accessible to everyone. If you require reasonable accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know. We are here to support you.