Spotify

Spotify

Director of ML Engineering, Conversation Product Area

New York, NY · Director

Sponsorship not specified$281k-$402kDetected 30 days ago
Code ReviewMachine LearningLLMsResearchLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration

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odds of building a lasting career here

64Sponsors, lottery-bound
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role100
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds (Level IV)94
Fits your clock70

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.

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About the role

  • needs a leader who is as comfortable making critical architectural calls as they are managing the people making them.

Responsibilities

  • Own engineering execution and technical direction for the Conversation Product Area, including the Agent Engine, the evaluation infrastructure, the Search platform, the AI Voice platform (Speak), and some consumer agentic features built on top of the Agent Engine.
  • Co-lead the Product Area in a paired product/engineering model.
  • You own engineering and deeply partner with a product counterpart that owns product strategy.
  • You'll manage a team of ~70 engineers, with a small team of Senior Engineering Managers and Staff/Principal engineers directly reporting to you.
  • You'll develop and hold accountable the EM layer running the PA's roughly 9 teams.
  • Drive the migration of the company's existing agentic infrastructure onto the shared Agent Engine, in close partnership product teams across the company, balancing migration speed against product teams' existing roadmap work.
  • Own the technical strategy for Spotify's first-party voice investment: what Speak builds versus buys, how the team organizes and delivers against a market that's commoditizing fast, and how the character/brand voice decisions for agent experiences get made and shipped on their own aggressive timelines.
  • Define and hold the technical bar on evaluation. Build the discipline around building feature-specific judges and datasets and product decisions based on those eval sets.
  • Participate as a full member of the broader leadership group, co-developing with your peers and executives the operating model for the whole studio across capacity management, project prioritization, studio communication principles, and building a healthy engineering culture in a highly changeable environment.
  • You know how to build a management structure that scales.

Requirements

  • You are deeply technical, not tech-adjacent.
  • 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

  • The United States base range for this position is $281,196 – $401,709 USD, plus equity.

Company info

  • 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.
  • Join us and you'll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them.
  • Spotify's Personalization mission (PZN) is building the single intelligence layer that powers how hundreds of millions of people discover and experience audio.
  • One agent, one reasoning engine, and one taste model, moving to a unified single stack.
  • We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the Conversation Product Area.
  • The Conversation Product Area is the technical center of gravity for the shift to one Agent, building the shared Agent Engine harness and the evaluation infrastructure that supports it.
  • The Product Area also owns the Search Brain (intent routing and search-driven conversation) the intent-detection and prompt-suggestion platform behind our agentic consumer features like Chat and AI DJ, and the Speak Platform, Spotify's first-party voice team, which spans applied research, production infrastructure, and the character/brand decisions behind every voice Spotify users hear.
  • This is the engineering org where architecture decisions get made that power every agentic surface at the company.
  • You'll be working with many of Spotify's senior architects, with product leadership in the consumer AI space, and with cross functional partners.
  • The team needs a leader who is as comfortable making critical architectural calls as they are managing the people making them.
  • We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best!
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This listing is sourced directly from Spotify's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.