{"id":2856137,"url":"https://alion.io/job/spotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2","title":"Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Home Surfaces","company":{"id":57,"name":"Spotify","domain":"spotify.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/spotify","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":86,"open_postings":14,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0.071,"time_to_fill_p50_days":51,"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":{"label":"ET","utc_offset_min":-5,"utc_offset_max":-5},"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States","Boston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":192000,"max_usd":361000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":197},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Flyte","optional":false},{"name":"FSDP","optional":false},{"name":"Google BigQuery","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LoRA","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Ray","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"PEFT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-21T10:47:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T08:25:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":34,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":34},"description":"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.\nThe Surfaces Podcasts team owns podcast recommendations across some of Spotify’s most visible surfaces, including Home and the Now Playing view. We build and improve the recommendation systems that help listeners discover their next favorite show or episode while helping creators reach the right audiences.\nAs a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll help shape the future of personalized discovery and engagement at Spotify. You’ll work at the intersection of recommendation systems, large language models, and production-scale machine learning infrastructure to build experiences for listeners at global scale. You’ll take models from research to production, help set technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces, and solve complex personalization challenges across Spotify.\nWhat You'll Do\nOwn and improve the machine learning models and systems that power the Home feed, including the Shortcuts experience.\nDesign, build, and ship personalized recommendations that serve millions of Spotify listeners globally.\nBuild content recommendation systems for emerging agentic and AI-powered user experiences.\nTrain, fine-tune, evaluate, and optimize large language models using techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), distillation, and parameter-efficient training approaches.\nPartner closely with Product Managers, Engineers, Data Scientists, and Designers to define and execute experimentation strategies.\nDrive A/B testing, monitoring, model evaluation, and continuous optimization of recommendation quality, reliability, and cost efficiency.\nImprove ML platform capabilities, data pipelines, and production systems that support personalization at Spotify scale.\nDrive technical direction in ambiguous problem spaces and contribute to the long-term architecture of our personalization systems.\nMentor and support other Machine Learning Engineers, sharing knowledge and helping strengthen engineering practices across the team.\nWho You Are\nYou have deep experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production environments.\nYou have deep experience with recommendation systems, ranking models, personalization, or large-scale content discovery platforms.\nYou are proficient in Python and have hands-on experience building machine learning systems with PyTorch.\nYou have experience with large language model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization techniques, including SFT, distillation, and LoRA.\nYou have worked with large-scale inference systems and understand the challenges of latency, reliability, and cost optimization.\nYou care about creating high-quality user experiences through thoughtful applications of machine learning.\nYou communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners and can influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team.\nYou know how to design, execute, and interpret online experiments and A/B tests to improve user outcomes.\nYou have experience operating distributed machine learning workloads using technologies such as Ray, FSDP, HSDP, or similar frameworks.\nYou have experience building and maintaining data pipelines and orchestration workflows using technologies such as Flyte, Airflow, BigQuery, and cloud-based storage platforms.\nWhere You'll Be\nWe offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location.\nThis team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3863,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Advertising","Music Industry","Podcasting","Streaming & OTT Platforms"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-19T14:53:39Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 95 · green card filings: 51","filings_12m":95,"filings_prev_12m":164,"green_card_filings_12m":51,"median_offered_wage_usd":205034,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":68}],"liveness":{"score":56,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.621,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":34,"expected_fill_days":51,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/spotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/spotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T10:02:45Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13615,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":57},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=57"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fspotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fspotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fspotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/spotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fspotify-staff-machine-learning-engineer-home-surfaces-2"}]}