Staff ML Engineer: Personalization & Discovery

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

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.