Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Spotify is a global audio streaming platform that helps listeners discover and enjoy music and podcasts. The Staff Machine Learning Engineer will build and lead production-scale recommendation systems, large language model applications, and personalization infrastructure for Home and Shortcuts experiences. The role also involves experimentation, technical direction, system optimization, and mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

• You have 8+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production environments
• You have deep expertise in recommendation systems, ranking models, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms
• You have strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience building machine learning systems with PyTorch
• You are experienced with large language model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization techniques including SFT, distillation, and LoRA
• You have worked with large-scale inference systems and understand the challenges of latency, reliability, and cost optimization
• You care deeply about creating high-quality user experiences through thoughtful application of machine learning
• You communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, and you influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team
• You know how to design, execute, and interpret online experiments and A/B tests to improve user outcomes
• You have experience operating distributed machine learning workloads using technologies such as Ray, FSDP, HSDP, or similar frameworks
• You are experienced building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows using technologies such as Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud-based storage platforms
• For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location
• This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration

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

Company Overview

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