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Music Streaming, Audio Entertainment, Technology, Digital Media

Machine Learning Engineer II

New York, New York, United StatesRemoteFull Time$170,000–$212,000 /yrPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Role summary

Spotify's Personalization team is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer II to enhance recommendation systems and develop emerging search and agentic experiences. This role involves hands-on ML development, designing and refining reward signals, and integrating mid-term signals into recommendation systems. The engineer will promote ML best practices and collaborate across teams. Qualifications include a background in machine learning with expertise in statistics, optimization, sequential models, transformers, generative AI, and LLMs. Experience with production ML systems at scale, distributed data processing frameworks (Spark, Beam), and cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) is required. The role emphasizes agile processes, data-driven development, and experimentation.

The Personalization (PZN) team makes deciding what to play next on Spotify easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music, podcasts and audiobooks better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like Home and Search as well as original playlists such as Made For You, Discover Weekly and Daily Mix.

Our team’s mission is to bring emerging search and agentic experiences to a mature state: exploring, defining, building, validating and optimizing new ideas. These can include new content types in our Search engine or emerging user interaction patterns.

What You'll Do

  • Contribute to designing, scaling/building, evaluating, integrating, shipping, and refining reward signals for recommendations by hands-on ML development.

  • Lead collaborations and align across Personalization to integrate and A/B test mid-term signals in various recommendation systems.

  • Promote and role-model best practices of ML systems development, testing, evaluation, etc., both inside the team as well as throughout the organization.

    • Who You Are

  • You have a background in machine learning, enjoy applying theory to develop real-world applications, with experience in statistics and optimization, especially in sequential models, transformers, generative AI and large language models, and relevant fine-tuning processes.

  • You have hands-on experience with large cross-collaborative machine learning projects and managing stakeholders.

  • You have hands-on experience implementing production machine learning systems at scale in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages.

  • You have some experience with large scale, distributed data processing frameworks/tools like Apache Beam, Apache Spark, or even our open source API for it - Scio, and cloud platforms like GCP or AWS.

  • You care about agile software processes, data-driven development, reliability, and disciplined experimentation.

    • Where You'll Be

    We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North America region as long as we have a work location.

    This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.

    The United States base range for this position is $170,000 - $212,000 plus equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.

    Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.

    At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know - we’re here to support you in any way we can.

    Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is 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 chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.

    Sample Spotify interview questions

    • 1

      Design a Spotify friends activity feed

      system designaverage
    • 2

      Design a data pipeline for Spotify's recommendations.

      system designaverage
    • 3

      Design an Ad Banner Delivery System

      system designmedium
    • 4

      How would you apply algorithms to Spotify functionality? Implement an existing feature during a system design exercise.

      codingaverage
    • 5

      Design the backend architecture for Spotify

      system designmedium

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