Staff Machine Learning Engineer – Home Surfaces

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New York.

📋 Description

• Take ownership and enhance the machine learning models and systems that drive Spotify's Home feed, including the Shortcuts feature.

• Create, develop, and deploy personalized recommendations for millions of Spotify users worldwide.

• Develop content recommendation systems for innovative agentic and AI-driven user experiences.

• Train, fine-tune, assess, and optimize large language models utilizing SFT, distillation, and parameter-efficient training techniques.

• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, data scientists, and designers to define and implement experimentation strategies.

• Lead A/B testing, monitoring, model assessment, and ongoing optimization of recommendation quality, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.

• Enhance ML platform capabilities, data pipelines, and production systems that facilitate personalization at Spotify scale.

• Guide technical direction in uncertain problem areas and contribute to the long-term architecture of personalization systems.

• Mentor and provide support to fellow machine learning engineers.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience in building and deploying machine learning systems in production settings.

• In-depth knowledge in recommendation systems, ranking models, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms.

• Strong command of Python.

• Practical experience in developing machine learning systems with PyTorch.

• Experience in training, fine-tuning, evaluating, and optimizing large language models, including SFT, distillation, and LoRA.

• Familiarity with large-scale inference systems along with latency, reliability, and cost optimization.

• Capability to design, conduct, and analyze online experiments and A/B tests.

• Experience managing distributed machine learning workloads using Ray, FSDP, HSDP, or similar frameworks.

• Background in building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows using Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud storage platforms.

• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Capacity to influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equal opportunity employer.

• Reasonable accommodation support throughout the recruitment and interview process.

• Flexible remote work options within the North Americas region where Spotify operates.