About the Role
The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next on Spotify easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like Home and Search, original playlists like Discover Weekly and Daylist, and are at the forefront of new innovations like AI DJ and AI Playlists.
Generative AI is transforming Spotify's product capabilities and technical architecture. Generative recommender systems, agent frameworks, and LLMs present huge opportunities for our products to serve more user needs and use cases and unlock richer understanding of our content and users.
This Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer will focus on recommender systems modeling at the intersection of generative recommenders and foundational understanding of personalization across music and talk content formats. You will work closely with a cross-functional team to define and execute the machine learning technical strategy for the product area, building the next generation of Spotify content and user representations and the technical architecture to support it. You will work as an individual contributor, offering the opportunity to shape the direction of Home loading paradigms, page serving, content filtering and content storage.
Join us and you'll keep millions of users listening to great recommendations every day!
What You'll Do
Lead the technical architecture of Spotify's Agent Engine, the shared runtime that powers agent-based experiences across the platform
Guide the transition of existing agent-powered features into a unified system, balancing speed, reliability, and real-world product constraints
Design how internal systems can be exposed as agent capabilities, enabling seamless integration across recommendations, search, catalog, and more
Build and improve evaluation systems that help teams measure quality, reliability, and user impact with confidence
Partner with research and machine learning teams to define what belongs in system design versus model capabilities
Explore and prototype new approaches to agent-based systems, and bring successful ideas into production at scale
Support best practices in building production-ready AI systems, including experimentation, observability, and performance optimization
Contribute to technical standards that help teams move faster while maintaining security and reliability
Stay connected to advances in the AI and machine learning community, and apply relevant ideas to Spotify's products
Who You Are
You have experience building and scaling production AI systems, including systems powered by large language models
You are comfortable working across system design, infrastructure, and machine learning concepts, and enjoy connecting these areas
You have experience with areas such as agent orchestration, LLM infrastructure, evaluation systems, or data pipelines for machine learning
You have worked on platform or consolidation efforts that bring multiple systems or teams together
You are able to make progress in ambiguous problem spaces and bring structure to open-ended challenges
You communicate clearly and work well with engineering, product, and research partners across different levels of the organization
You stay informed on developments in AI and are motivated to apply new ideas in practical ways
You take a pragmatic approach to building, using prototypes and iteration to move ideas forward
You take ownership of outcomes and proactively manage risks, trade-offs, and expectations
Where You'll Be
• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North America 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 $281,196 - $401,709 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 reque