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Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Personalization
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote · North America
Experience
Senior · 8+ years
Job description
Staff Machine Learning Engineer on the Surfaces Moments team within Spotify's Personalization Mission, building moment-based personalized experiences such as the Home Shortcuts experience. The role spans recommendation systems, large language models, and production-scale ML infrastructure.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote · North America
- Pay
- USD 227,495 – 324,993 / year
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
What we're looking for
- 8+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production environments
- Deep expertise in recommendation systems, ranking models, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms
- Strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience building machine learning systems with PyTorch
- Experience with large language model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization techniques including SFT, distillation, and LoRA
- Experience with large-scale inference systems and understanding of latency, reliability, and cost optimization challenges
- Care deeply about creating high-quality user experiences through thoughtful application of machine learning
- Communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, and influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team
- Know how to design, execute, and interpret online experiments and A/B tests to improve user outcomes
- Experience operating distributed machine learning workloads using technologies such as Ray, FSDP, HSDP, or similar frameworks
- Experience building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows using technologies such as Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud-based storage platforms
Your team
Surfaces Moments (Personalization Mission)
An ML team within the Personalization Mission focused on creating moment-based experiences across Spotify surfaces, owning the Home Shortcuts experience and the underlying intelligence that powers it.
Benefits
- Equity
- 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
Apply
About Spotify
The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener, behind features such as Blend and Discover Weekly.
Key facts
- The Personalization team is behind some of Spotify's most-loved features, from Blend to Discover Weekly
- The team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration