Spotify

Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Content Platform

Spotify$281K — $401K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Significant experience designing and building production-grade machine learning systems at scale.
  • Deep experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
  • Experience or strong interest in multimodal machine learning (text, audio, image, video).
  • Experience in creating systems where ML outputs inform real-world decisions.
  • Understanding of balancing automation with quality and user experience.
  • Ability to tackle complex technical problems with significant impact.
  • Experience in connecting models, data, and infrastructure for platform-level outcomes.

Responsibilities

  • Define and drive machine learning strategy for content understanding and policy enforcement.
  • Build and scale ML systems for content classification, moderation, and risk detection.
  • Develop automated systems for content quality and policy compliance.
  • Design and deploy ML systems for various content types (text, audio, video).
  • Create real-time decision-making systems for content evaluation.
  • Enable access to content and metadata for other applications.
  • Collaborate with teams to translate content standards into technical solutions.
  • Mentor engineers and influence ML engineering best practices.

Benefits

  • Health insurance coverage.
  • Six months of 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 Content Platform team powers the full lifecycle of content across music, podcasts, audiobooks, and emerging formats at Spotify. We ensure that everything from licensed catalog to user-generated content is understood, trusted, safe, and high quality for millions of listeners worldwide. Our systems are responsible for how content is ingested, understood, enriched, governed, and distributed across the platform.

As the scale and diversity of content continue to grow-driven by advances in AI, new creation tools, and emerging content formats-we're investing in intelligent systems that can understand, evaluate, manage, and route content reliably at global scale.

We're hiring Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineers to build and scale foundational ML systems that power content understanding, safety, policy enforcement, and decisioning across Spotify. Depending on your experience and interests, you may focus on areas ranging from multimodal content understanding and platform-level ML systems to safety, risk detection, policy enforcement, and compliance.

You'll help shape the architecture and technical strategy behind how Spotify understands and makes decisions about content at global scale. This work is foundational to delivering safe, high-quality experiences for listeners and creators while enabling new ways for people to interact with content across Spotify.

What You Will Do

  • Define and drive machine learning strategy across content understanding, safety, policy enforcement, and platform-level decisioning
  • Build and scale production ML systems for classification, moderation, ranking, risk detection, and content evaluation
  • Develop automated decisioning systems that support content quality, integrity, safety, and policy compliance at scale
  • Design and deploy ML systems across multiple content modalities, including text, audio, image, and video
  • Build systems capable of evaluating and making decisions about content in real time and at Spotify scale
  • Enable controlled and reliable access to content and metadata for downstream products and applications
  • Collaborate closely with Product, Policy, Trust & Safety, and Engineering teams to translate content standards into scalable technical solutions
  • Advance automation while maintaining high standards for quality, safety, fairness, explainability, and reliability
  • Provide technical leadership across teams, mentoring engineers and influencing ML engineering, evaluation, and system design best practices


Who You Are

  • You have significant experience designing and building production-grade machine learning systems at scale
  • You have deep experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or similar
  • You have experience with-or a strong interest in-multimodal machine learning across areas such as text, audio, image, or video
  • You have built systems where machine learning outputs inform or automate real-world decisions
  • You understand how to balance automation with quality, safety, reliability, and user experience
  • You're comfortable tackling complex and ambiguous technical problems with significant product and business impact
  • You think in systems, connecting models, data, infrastructure, and decisioning to platform-level outcomes and user experiences
  • You care deeply about data quality, rigorous evaluation, fairness, explainability, and system reliability
  • You're an experienced technical leader who communicates clearly, mentors others, and can influence across technical and non-technical teams


Where You Will 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 $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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us. Find our AI notice here: https://lifeatspotify.com/ai-notice

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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