Spotify

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization, Magenta

Spotify$184K — $262K *
US-AnywhereRemote in New York, NY
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience building and shipping machine learning systems in production environments
  • Experienced with large language models in real-world applications
  • Deep understanding of conversational/agentic system challenges
  • Skilled in designing evaluation metrics or pipelines for ML systems
  • Proficient in debugging complex interactions involving models and system constraints
  • Passionate about delivering reliable, user-oriented scalable systems
  • Strong team player with cross-functional collaboration experience

Responsibilities

  • Design and ship production-grade machine learning systems for conversational AI
  • Build systems to interpret user intent and manage multi-turn interactions
  • Develop workflows for memory, context management, and tool orchestration
  • Create evaluation frameworks to measure system quality and guide iteration
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and design teams for user-facing solutions
  • Balance experimentation with production requirements to ensure system performance
  • Enhance agent behavior through feedback loops and real-world usage data

Benefits

  • Health insurance
  • Six months paid parental leave
  • 401(k) retirement plan
  • Monthly meal allowance
  • 23 paid days off
  • 13 paid flexible holidays
  • Paid sick leave
Full 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.

The Sessions Department within Personalization is building a portfolio of agentic and conversational products that define how hundreds of millions of people discover and experience audio, such as prompted Playlists or DJ, all powered by a single layer that understands music, culture, and the user's taste

You'll join a team of four engineers actively building the agent and the strategy behind it. We work closely with the broader Sessions organization on one of the most highly-leveraged bets at Spotify right now: making it possible to have natural language conversation with Spotify across the entire app!

The team moves fast by staying hyper-focused: we pick a focused set of problems, ship new features to users weekly, and learn in the wild. We constantly dogfood our product and learn from users' data and feedback to find the most important next thing to build or improve, together.

What You'll Do

  • You'll build and improve the core agentic capabilities that power the agent behind Talk to Spotify (memory, context management, multi-step tool use)
  • You'll design and calibrate evaluation frameworks (including LLM-as-judge) that accelerate our confidence in the agent's behavior, and increase our offline-to-online success
  • You'll work in a very dynamic space: the team prototypes, dogfoods, ships, learns, and refines in tight loops with real users, as our understanding of the problem and users' expectations of agentic products and Spotify evolve


Who You Are

  • You're excited by agentic experiences - building agents, evaluating agents, and the hard problems in between (context handling, multi-step reasoning, ambiguity at scale)
  • You like getting your hands dirty: shipping quickly, testing ideas against real usage, and learning from the wild rather than over-indexing on offline evaluation
  • You have 5+ years of production ML experience deploying highly impactful products, or equivalent experience in other roles with a deep ML background
  • You know how to evaluate ML systems rigorously - designing metrics, building eval pipelines, judge alignment, and can develop intuition through dogfooding and looking at user behavior
  • You're comfortable debugging the messy interactions between models, tools, and system constraints like latency


Where You'll Be

  • This role is based in New York
  • We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home


The United States base range for this position is $184,050- $262,928 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.

About Spotify

Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider, launched in October 2008. The platform is owned by Spotify AB, a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange since April 2018. Spotify's primary business is providing an audio streaming platform, with the company claiming that it had 345 million active monthly users and 155 million paying subscribers as of December 2020. Unlike physical or download sales, which pay artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service. Spotify distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders, who then pay artists based on their individual agreements. Spotify has faced criticism from artists and producers including Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke, who have argued that it does not fairly compensate musicians. Spotify has also faced criticism from artists and producers including Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke, who have argued that it does not fairly compensate musicians.
Learn more about Spotify
Size
3,456 employees
Industry
Founded
2006

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