Director, Machine Learning Engineering - Surfaces Foundation

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 and podcasts better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like Home and Search, original playlists like Discover Weekly and Daylist, and are at the forefront of new innovations like AI DJ and AI Playlists.

Generative AI is transforming Spotify’s product capabilities and technical architecture. Generative recommender systems, agent frameworks, and LLMs present huge opportunities for our products to serve more user needs and use cases and unlock richer understanding of our content and users. This Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer will focus on recommender systems modeling at the intersection of generative recommenders and foundational understanding of personalization across music and talk content formats.

You will work closely with a cross-functional team to define and execute the machine learning technical strategy for the product area, building the next generation of Spotify content and user representations and the technical architecture to support it. You will work as an individual contributor, offering the opportunity to shape the direction of Home loading paradigms, page serving, content filtering and content storage. Join us and you’ll keep millions of users listening to great recommendations every day!

What You'll Do Lead and support engineering managers and their teams building platform systems for personalized recommendations across Spotify Set and evolve the technical vision for foundational capabilities, including targeting, serving, evaluation, and agent-driven systems Make thoughtful decisions about what should become platform capabilities, ensuring teams can move quickly without unnecessary complexity Guide incremental platform evolution, enabling continuous delivery rather than large, disruptive rewrites Partner closely with product, data science, and engineering leaders to align priorities across multiple squads Stay close to the technology when needed, contributing to architecture decisions and resolving complex production challenges Encourage adoption of AI-assisted development tools and shape how teams use them effectively in day-to-day work Hire, develop, and grow engineering leaders and individual contributors, building a strong and inclusive team culture Who You Are You have experience building and operating machine learning systems at scale in consumer-facing products You have worked on recommendation systems, ranking, or content delivery platforms and understand end-to-end ML workflows You bring strong platform thinking, with the ability to decide when to build shared capabilities and when to keep solutions closer to product teams You are comfortable working with modern AI tools and understand how they influence software development practices You have led teams through change, supporting adoption of new technologies or ways of working You collaborate effectively across disciplines and help create alignment across teams with different priorities You care about building inclusive, supportive team environments and invest in the growth of others You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term impact Where You'll Be We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North America region as long as we have a work location This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration