Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Home Surfaces

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New York, +1 more state.

📋 Description

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

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

• Create 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 methods.

• Collaborate with Product Managers, Engineers, Data Scientists, and Designers to define and implement experimentation strategies.

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

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

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

• Mentor and assist other Machine Learning Engineers, reinforcing engineering practices throughout the team.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience in building and deploying machine learning systems in production settings.

• Profound knowledge of recommendation systems, ranking models, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms.

• Proficiency in Python.

• Practical experience in developing machine learning systems using PyTorch.

• Familiarity with large language model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization techniques, such as SFT, distillation, and LoRA.

• Experience with large-scale inference systems and an understanding of challenges related to latency, reliability, and cost optimization.

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

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

• Adept at building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows with tools like Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud-based storage solutions.

• Strong communication skills, able to engage effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and influence technical decisions.

• Willingness to work within the North Americas region where Spotify has a physical office.

• Availability for collaboration within the Eastern Standard Time zone.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• Six months of paid parental leave

• 401(k) retirement plan

• Monthly meal allowance

• 23 paid days off

• 13 paid flexible holidays

• Paid sick leave

• Equity