Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Home Surfaces
Spotify· Engineering – Personalization
Hybrid (North America)$227.5k - $325kPermanentPosted 1mo ago
About the role
Staff ML Engineer role within Spotify's Personalization team, focusing on Home Surfaces and moment-based experiences to deliver personalized recommendations at scale, including Home feed and Shortcuts, leveraging ML, R&D, and production ML infrastructure.
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.
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 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 Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud-based storage platforms.
Skills
Required:Machine learning system design and deploymentRecommendation systems / ranking modelsPythonPyTorchLarge language model training / fine-tuningDistributed 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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Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.
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