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Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization

Spotify· Engineering – Personalization
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Hybrid (New York, NY)$227.5k - $325kPermanentPosted 2mo ago

About the role

The Personalization team builds features to personalize discovery and engagement on Spotify, focusing on moment-based experiences (e.g., Home Shortcuts) and scalable recommendation systems. The Staff ML Engineer will shape the future of personalized discovery, taking models from research to production and driving technical direction in ambiguous problems at global scale.

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 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 long-term architecture of personalization systems.
  • - Mentor and support other machine learning engineers, raising the bar across the team.

Qualifications

  • - 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 ML 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, latency, reliability, and cost optimization considerations.
  • - Commitment to high-quality user experiences through ML.
  • - Effective communication across technical and non-technical audiences and ability to influence decisions beyond the immediate team.
  • - Ability to design, execute, and interpret online experiments and A/B tests to improve user outcomes.
  • - Experience operating distributed ML workloads using Ray, FSDP, HSDP, or similar frameworks.
  • - Experience building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows using Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud storage platforms.

Skills

Required:PythonPyTorchLarge language models (LLMs)Distributed ML workloadsData pipelines / orchestration

Benefits

  • 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
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Spotify

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