Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Podcast

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Spotify, you will be a key part of the Podcast Mission, developing systems for interactive podcast experiences. This product-oriented role involves integrating foundational models, crafting feedback loops for real-time interactivity, and shaping how creators and consumers connect. You'll advise leadership on ML solutions, make build-vs-buy decisions, and collaborate with ML teams across Spotify to enhance the Spotify for Creators product.

Must Have

• Tech lead ML initiatives for podcast and video features.
• Advise leadership on ML initiatives, guiding prioritization.
• Serve as liaison for ML efforts within the Podcast mission and across Spotify.
• Mentor engineers in ML practices.
• Work closely with backend, data, client engineers, PMs, and designers to ship features.
• Prototype novel agentic workflows and contribute to experimentation.
• Own and evolve ML model lifecycle: data annotation, pipeline, feature engineering, training, deployment, monitoring.
• Design, develop, fine-tune, and deploy machine learning systems.
• Optimize models for scale and reliability using modern ML infra tools.
• Lead with an experimentation attitude, implement A/B tests, and contribute to continuous model evaluation.
• Participate in Spotify’s ML community.

Good to Have

• Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Strong interest in agent-based systems and LLM integrations.
• Experience with content recommendation, interactive media formats, or real-time systems.
• Led initiatives within an organization, balancing trade-offs, engaging collaborators, and crafting clear roadmaps.

Perks & Benefits

• Health insurance
• Six month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• 13 paid flexible holidays
• Flexibility to work where you work best within the North Americas region

We’re part of Spotify’s Podcast Mission, focused on giving podcast creators tools to grow their audiences and connect more deeply with listeners. The team is building the systems that power interactive podcast experiences, enabling everything from polls, comments, and Q&A to emerging agent-driven features.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, from integrating foundational models to crafting feedback loops for real-time interactivity, you'll shape how creators and consumers connect in more dynamic and intelligent ways. This is a product-oriented role where you’ll spend time understanding roadmaps and advising leadership on the trade-offs of implementing ML solutions. You’ll also play a key role in build-vs-buy decisions, assessing the engineering effort required, and connecting with ML teams across Spotify to find opportunities for collaboration with the Podcast mission.

What You'll Do

• Tech lead ML initiatives for podcast and video features while helping define and maintain a clear roadmap for the Spotify for Creators and Megaphone apps.
• Advise leadership on ML initiatives, guiding prioritization and shaping decisions on the development and rollout of ML features.
• Serve as the liaison ML efforts within the Podcast mission and ML engineers/PMs across Spotify, ensuring deep understanding of existing systems and facilitating their seamless integration into the Spotify for Creators product.
• Mentor engineers in ML practices to level up Podcast Mission’s capabilities in the space.
• Work closely with backend, data, and client engineers as well as PMs and designers to ship features that directly impact podcast engagement metrics.
• Prototype novel agentic workflows (e.g., multi-component pipelines or tool-using agents) and contribute to experimentation around Creator-Consumer interactivity.
• Own and evolve ML model lifecycle: data annotation, data pipeline construction, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and monitoring.
• Design, develop, fine-tune, and deploy machine learning systems that power podcast growth.
• Optimize models for scale and reliability using modern ML infra tools like Ray, Apache Beam, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Lead with an experimentation attitude. Implement A/B tests and contribute to continuous model evaluation and improvement loops to productionize solutions at scale for our millions of active podcast users.
• Participate in Spotify’s ML community: share findings, explore new tools and paradigms, and contribute to scaling ML standards across the company.

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years of professional experience in machine learning, with expertise in building and productionize ML systems at scale.
• You’re fluent in Python; experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow is a strong plus.
• You’ve worked with large-scale data systems and owning end-to-end ML workflows (data ingestion to serving).
• You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms like GCP or AWS, and with ML infra tools such as Ray, Apache Beam, or Airflow.
• You have experience, or strong interest, in agent-based systems and LLM integrations.
• You thrive in agile environments, care deeply about product impact, and bring a user-centered outlook to ML development.
• Bonus: Experience with content recommendation, interactive media formats, or real-time systems.
• Bonus: You’ve led initiatives within an organization, expertly balancing trade-offs in large-scale systems, engaging with collaborators, and crafting clear, actionable roadmaps.

Where You'll Be

• We 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.
• This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.

The United States base range for this position is $ 176,166 - $ 251,666, plus equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, a monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays. These ranges may be modified in the future.