Spotify
Senior Applied Research Scientist - Personalization
New York, NY · Senior
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$24,803 more — $193,960 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $193,960 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Computer and Information Research Scientists" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Computer and Information Research Scientists (15-1221) · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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About the role
- The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener.
- From Blend to Discover Weekly, we're behind some of Spotify's most-loved features.
- We built them by understanding the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else.
Responsibilities
- Develop and experiment with new methods for speech synthesis and speech recognition, along with end-to-end approaches, building on the latest research and ideas.
- Collaborate with our engineering and data teams on ideas requiring new infrastructure or new high-quality data, as well as to help improve our speech recognition and speech synthesis pipelines, and help turn proven ideas into scalable products.
- Within Personalization, the Speak Team owns the development of Spotify's state-of-the-art speech models, contributing to speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech-to-speech models.
- We craft voice models that match human-level emotional expressiveness, so we can deeply engage our listeners and support creators at scale.
- You'll collaborate with our engineering teams to help develop our production pipelines, explore new ideas and methods to improve quality, understanding and realism, as well as push the frontiers of what is possible with our speech technology.
Requirements
- You have a strong background in ML (PhD degree on top of professional experience), and experience in working with any of the following: transformers, GANs, diffusion models, flow matching, VAEs, audio codecs.
- You have strong experience with Python, particularly PyTorch.
- You have strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical ideas with clarity to technical and non-technical people alike.
- You have experience in an academic or professional setting conducting high-quality research.
- You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what's playing in your headphones.
Compensation
- $169k-$242k
Benefits
- You have experience in developing generative models for speech synthesis, speech recognition, audio/music, natural language processing, or computer vision.
Company info
- Where You'll Be - This role is based in New York City. - We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best!
- At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone.
- Be part of a highly motivated research team dedicated to building and creating models at scale to power the Spotify platform.
- We're looking for a senior applied research scientist with experience in developing novel ML techniques and architectures and with a strong interest in working across a full production pipeline to produce state-of-the-art generative conversational speech-to-speech models.
This listing is sourced directly from Spotify's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.