Staff Machine Learning Engineer (New York)

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

The Personalization team at Spotify makes deciding what to play next effortless and enjoyable for every listener. We aim to deeply understand music, podcasts, audiobooks, and videos to deliver exceptional recommendations that keep hundreds of millions of people engaged every day. Our work spans across experiences like Home, Search, curated playlists such as Discover Weekly and Daylist, and new innovations like AI DJ and AI Playlists. Search is one of the most important entry points into Spotify's ecosystempowering how listeners find and rediscover music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Beyond retrieval, Search drives exploration and discovery, connecting fans with creators in new ways. Building world-class Search means tackling natural language understanding, personalization, and generative AI at massive scale.

Generative AI is also revolutionizing Spotify's product capabilities and technical infrastructure, with generative recommender systems, agent frameworks, and LLMs opening significant opportunities to meet diverse user needs, expand use cases, and gain richer insights into our content and users. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Search, you'll focus on recommender systems modeling at the intersection of generative recommenders and foundational understanding of user taste across music and talk content. You will define and execute the ML technical strategy for Search, building the next generation of Spotify's recommendation systems, user representations, and supporting technical architecture. Join us and you'll help millions of users discover and connect with the world's audio content every day.

What You'll Do

• Define and drive the ML technical strategy for Search, focusing on retrieval, ranking, and generative approaches
• Build models that improve query understanding, personalization, and relevance across Spotify's Search experiences
• Collaborate with a cross-functional agile team spanning user research, design, data science, product management, and engineering
• Prototype and productionize new modeling approaches at scale, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide
• Lead high-impact projects from ideation through deployment, setting best practices for ML development, testing, evaluation, and experimentation
• Partner with tech leaders and stakeholders to influence priorities and ensure long-term scalability and impact
• Stay engaged with the broader ML and Search research community, applying emerging trends to Spotify's challenges

Who You Are

Where You'll Be

The United States base range for this position is $215,136- $307,337 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.