Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Spotify

full-time

Posted on: 9/16/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States • New York

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💰 $215,136 - $307,337 per year

Lead

JavaPythonPyTorchScalaTensorflow

About the role

Define and drive the ML technical strategy for Search, focusing on retrieval, ranking, and generative approaches
Build models that improve query understanding, personalization, and relevance across Spotify’s Search experiences
Collaborate with a cross-functional agile team spanning user research, design, data science, product management, and engineering
Prototype and productionize new modeling approaches at scale, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide
Lead high-impact projects from ideation through deployment, setting best practices for ML development, testing, evaluation, and experimentation
Partner with tech leaders and stakeholders to influence priorities and ensure long-term scalability and impact
Stay engaged with the broader ML and Search research community, applying emerging trends to Spotify’s challenges

Strong background in machine learning and recommender systems, bridging research and user impact
Hands-on experience training and operating transformer models in production, or strong interest in doing so
Production experience developing large-scale ML systems in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages
Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow is a strong plus
Comfortable navigating ambiguity and leading high-impact projects from start to finish
Systems thinker and strong communicator who can align and influence technical and product stakeholders
Care deeply about agile processes, data-driven development, and reliability
Eager to apply emerging ML trends, particularly in LLMs and generative recommenders, to Spotify’s challenges