Senior Engineering Manager - ML

Spotify; New York (NY); On-site; USD 227,495 - 324,993; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Equity

Six-month parental leave

401(k) retirement plan

Meal allowance

23 paid days off

Flexible holidays

Job summary

Spotify seeks a Senior Engineering Manager for Agentic Systems to shape the architecture of agent-powered features across personalization, search, and content. You will partner with research, ML, engineering, and data teams to define technical strategy and consolidate implementations onto a single engine.

You will lead 5–10 engineers, mentor teams, and influence product roadmaps while driving advanced Gen AI capabilities in a fast-paced, inclusive environment.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping generative AI tech in large-scale consumer products.
• Ability to lead a modern generative AI team (transformers, diffusion, etc.) and drive user-focused improvements.
• Strong servant leadership, mentorship, and coaching across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the architectural direction for Spotify's agent-powered features.
• Collaborate with research, ML, backend, and data teams to define strategy and roadmaps.
• Provide servant leadership and develop a diverse, high-performing engineering culture.
• Drive consolidation of agent implementations onto a single engine powering products.

Skills

Generative AI leadership

Architectural strategy

Cross-functional leadership

Mentorship and coaching

Communication

Tools

LLM tools

Job description

Engineering

Engineering Leadership

Permanent

New York, Boston or Miami

Spotify’s Personalization team is building the next generation of intelligent listening experiences. Across surfaces like DJ, Search, AI Playlists, and Home, we’re evolving from standalone features into a unified, agent-powered platform.

Generative AI is transforming Spotify's product capabilities and technical architecture. Agent frameworks, LLM orchestration, and agentic reasoning present huge opportunities for our products to serve more user needs and use cases, and to unlock richer, more dynamic relationships between listeners and the things they love.

This Senior Engineering Manager for Agentic Systems will focus on the architecture and evolution of Spotify agent-powered features. This role sits at the intersection of production systems engineering, LLM infrastructure, evaluation science, and applied research, and it requires someone who can operate fluidly across all of them. You will work as a senior individual contributor with significant architectural authority, partnering with a cross‑functional team to define the technical strategy for how Spotify's agents are built, evaluated, and scaled, and driving the consolidation of our agent implementations onto a single engine that can power the next generation of the product.

What You’ll Do

• Be accountable for teams building Spotify Agentic Experience delivering new and innovative products at the heart of music, podcast and audiobooks users love.
• Together with a wide range of collaborators, develop a generative AI tech strategy that keeps Spotify at the forefront of innovation in the field.
• Provide servant leadership to several teams working across research, machine learning, engineering management, backend engineers, and data specialists.
• Advocate for and increase knowledge of advanced Gen AI capabilities across the company, including influencing the company’s most senior leaders.
• Cultivate a balanced, collaborative engineering culture and a diverse and inclusive team that reflects our customers and our world.
• Directly manage ~5-10 people.
• Collaborate with a product lead to define strategy, success metrics and roadmaps.
• Influence the technical design and architecture of the Conversation team’s stack.
• Influence the Personalization team’s research and roadmap. Collaborate with leaders throughout the company to plan and execute impactful initiatives requiring many teams.

Who You Are

• You have significant expertise in shipping generative AI technologies and their application to high scale consumer products.
• You have demonstrated the ability to lead a modern generative AI team (e.g. transformers, diffusion and other recent technologies) to incorporate generative AI into consumer facing products, continuously making the models better for users while optimizing performance and cost.
• You practice servant leadership, have strong mentorship and coaching skills, and thrive when helping individuals and teams perform to their full potential.
• You love facilitating collaboration among several teams, developing and growing teams and their leaders while driving delivery.
• You are able to distill complex information into easy-to-understand concepts, and understand how to lead a team through ambiguity.
• You thrive when bringing research to market as amazing products for users.

Where You’ll Be

• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the US region as long as we have a work location.
• This team operates within the US Eastern timezone for collaboration.

Learn about life at Spotify

The United States base range for this position is $227,495–$324,993 USD, 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, paid flexible holidays, and 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.

Our Global Benefits

• Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse.
• Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success.
• Global parental leave, six months off - for all new parents.
• All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub.
• Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs.