Spotify
Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Personalization
New York, New York, USA · Senior · full-time
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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
This range already reaches Level IV — the maximum four lottery entries.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · 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 on Spotify easier and more enjoyable for every listener.
- We seek to understand the world of music better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening.
- The Surfaces Music team is responsible for music recommendations across Spotify's most visible surfaces, including Home and the Now Playing experience.
Responsibilities
- Contribute to the design, development, evaluation, and iteration of recommendation models - including candidate generation, ranking, and embedding models - powering music surfaces at scale.
- Drive hands-on ML development to improve reward signals and recommendation quality across Home, Now Playing, and other core surfaces.
- Collaborate with Data Science, Product, and Design partners to define success metrics, run A/B experiments, and translate insights into product improvements.
- Partner with teams across Personalization to integrate and test new signals in recommendation systems.
- Every day, hundreds of millions of people use the products we build, including destinations like Home and Search, original playlists like Discover Weekly and Daylist, and new innovations like AI DJ and AI Playlists.
- We own music shelf and candidate generation as well as the ranking models that power these experiences.
Requirements
- You have experience implementing ML systems in Java, Scala, Python, or similar languages.
- You have some experience with large-scale distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Beam, Apache Spark, or Scio, and cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform or AWS.
- You have experience collaborating across teams on complex ML projects and navigating cross-functional stakeholders.
- 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.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with PyTorch, Ray or Hugging Face is a plus.
Compensation
- $210k-$260k
Benefits
- You have hands-on experience building and shipping production machine learning systems at scale, ideally in personalization or recommendation systems.
- The United States base range for this position is $210,000 - $260,000 plus equity.
- The benefits available for this position include 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.
Company info
- Where You'll Be This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration 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.
Equal opportunity
- equal opportunity employer.
This listing is sourced directly from Spotify's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.