Research Scientist, Machine Learning – Search & Recommendations

NLP PEOPLE; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading music streaming service in the United Kingdom is seeking a Senior Research Scientist. This role focuses on advanced research in machine intelligence and user understanding, aiming to enhance user engagement through data-driven approaches. The ideal candidate will hold a PhD and have strong expertise in machine learning and related fields. Opportunities to collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team and impact product direction are key aspects of this position.

Qualifications

• PhD in a relevant field with a focus on computational techniques.
• Strong knowledge of machine learning and user understanding.
• Experience in visualizing and analyzing real data.

Responsibilities

• Engage in cutting-edge research in machine intelligence.
• Collaborate to solve complex problems creatively.
• Impact product direction while developing research roadmaps.

Skills

Machine Learning

Natural Language Processing

User Behavioral Analysis

Data Mining

Machine Intelligence

Education

PhD in Computer Science or Data Science

Tools

Deep Learning

Optimization Techniques

Statistical Analysis Software

Job description

We are looking for Senior Research Scientists for Spotify’s User Engagement organization. User Engagement is a high impact team that is building the next generation technologies aimed at making every user interaction with Spotify amazing through personalization and discovery. Our goal is to deliver the right content to the right user at the right time in order to maximize engagement.

We’re looking for talented research scientists who have applied experience in the field of Machine Learning, Machine Intelligence, User Behavioral Analysis, IR, NLP, and more broadly, AI. You will be part of an interdisciplinary team focusing on ensuring that the foundations of Spotify technologies are at or above the state of the art and, in the process, redefine the state of the art for the field and contributing to the wider research community by publishing papers. Our team has strong ties internally to product groups as well as externally to the research community.

The User Engagement team works on some of Spotify’s key features – personalized playlists such as Discover Weekly and Daily Mix, the Home view, and Search. Our projects are intended to take on some of technology’s greatest challenges and make impact on millions of users. Some of the challenges our team is working on include developing terascale solutions for understanding and interpreting user interaction signals, understanding user success with short term & long term metrics, developing algorithmically curated playlists and other challenges in machine learning and user understanding.

Responsibilities include:

• Participate in cutting edge research in machine intelligence, user understanding and machine learning applications.
• Apply scientific knowledge to analyze data, perform statistical analyses, identify problems, devise solutions and construct methodologies, including metrics and best practices, and conduct experiments to validate these.
• Work in collaboration with other scientists, analysts and engineers across Spotify to design creative solutions to challenging problems.
• Have product impact, while working on and further develop Spotify’s long-term research roadmap.

Qualifications:

You have a PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, or related areas with a strong computational focus. You will have a strong knowledge of data mining, machine learning or evaluation with experience in machine learning, deep learning, optimization techniques, information retrieval and/or natural language understanding.

Preferred qualifications include:

• Publications in communities such as WWW, SIGIR, WSDM, RecSys, CHI, KDD, AAAI, ACL, NIPS, ICML, or related, in the following topics: user understanding, metrics and evaluation, large scale experimentation, information retrieval, recommendation, machine learning.
• Solid hands-on skills in sourcing, cleaning, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing and modeling of real data.
• A passion for making sense of user behavior, using any available methods.
• A creative problem-solver who is passionate about digging into complex problems and devising new approaches to reach results.

Please note that we are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all qualified candidates.