Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Home Surfaces

Spotify; New York (NY); On-site; USD 227,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Job summary

Spotify is crafting the future of personalized discovery. We seek a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to advance the Home feed and Moments surfaces, combining recommender systems, LLMs, and scalable ML infra. You’ll take models from research to production and steer direction in ambiguous spaces at global scale.

You’ll partner with product, engineering, data science and design teams to design experiments, optimize latency and cost, and raise the bar across the personalization stack.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and deploying ML systems in production.
• Deep expertise in recommendation, ranking, or content discovery.
• Strong Python skills and PyTorch experience.
• Experience with LLM training, fine-tuning, and optimization (SFT, distillation, LoRA).
• Experience with large-scale inference, latency and cost challenges.
• Proven ability to run online experiments and A/B tests.
• Track record of building scalable data pipelines and orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve ML models and systems powering the Home feed and Shortcuts.
• Design, build, and ship personalized recommendations for millions of listeners.
• Build content recommendation systems for agentic/AI-powered experiences.
• Train, fine-tune, evaluate, and optimize large language models (SFT, distillation, LoRA).
• Collaborate with PMs, engineers, data scientists and designers on experiments.
• Drive A/B testing, monitoring, and optimization of recommendation quality and cost.
• Improve ML platform capabilities, data pipelines, and production systems at Spotify scale.
• Shape long-term personalization architecture and mentor other ML Engineers.

Skills

ML systems

Recommendation systems

Python

PyTorch

LLM training

Inference systems

Distributed ML

Data pipelines

Tools

Ray

FSDP

HSDP

Flyte

Airflow

BigQuery

Job description

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend to Discover Weekly, we're behind some of Spotify's most-loved features. We built them by understanding the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else. Join us and you'll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them.

Surfaces Moments is a ML team within the Personalization Mission focused on creating moment-based experiences across Spotify surfaces. The team owns and evolves the experiences that help listeners quickly connect with the content that matters most to them, including the Home Shortcuts experience and the underlying intelligence that powers it.

By combining cutting-edge machine learning, recommendation systems, and product thinking, the team delivers highly relevant, personalized experiences to millions of listeners around the world.

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will help shape the future of personalized discovery and engagement at Spotify. You'll work at the intersection of recommendation systems, large language models, and production-scale machine learning infrastructure to build experiences that delight users and drive meaningful impact. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys taking models from research to production, driving technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces, and solving complex personalization challenges at global scale.

What You'll Do

• Own and improve the machine learning models and systems that power the Home feed, including the Shortcuts experience.
• Design, build, and ship personalized recommendations that serve millions of Spotify listeners globally.
• Build content recommendation systems for emerging agentic and AI-powered user experiences.
• Train, fine-tune, evaluate, and optimize large language models using techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), distillation, and parameter-efficient training approaches.
• Partner closely with product managers, engineers, data scientists, and designers to define and execute experimentation strategies.
• Drive A/B testing, monitoring, model evaluation, and continuous optimization of recommendation quality, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Improve ML platform capabilities, data pipelines, and production systems that support personalization at Spotify scale.
• Drive technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces and contribute to the long-term architecture of personalization systems.
• Mentor and support other machine learning engineers, helping raise the bar across the team.

Who You Are

• You have 8+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production environments.
• You have deep expertise in recommendation systems, ranking models, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms.
• You have strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience building machine learning systems with PyTorch.
• You are experienced with large language model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization techniques including SFT, distillation, and LoRA.
• You have worked with large-scale inference systems and understand the challenges of latency, reliability, and cost optimization.
• You care deeply about creating high-quality user experiences through thoughtful application of machine learning.
• You communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, and you influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team
• You know how to design, execute, and interpret online experiments and A/B tests to improve user outcomes.
• You have experience operating distributed machine learning workloads using technologies such as Ray, FSDP, HSDP, or similar frameworks.
• You are experienced building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows using technologies such as Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud-based storage platforms.

Where You'll Be

• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North Americas 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 $227,495- $324,993 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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us. Find our AI notice here: https://lifeatspotify.com/ai-notice

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