About the company
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. Growlithe is a fast-moving squad within Spotify's Conversation Product Area, focused on bringing emerging Search and agentic experiences to life.
Responsibilities
- Build and improve machine learning models that make Spotify Search more relevant, personalized, and engaging for listeners
- Develop and optimize ranking and backend retrieval systems that help listeners discover music, videos, audiobooks, and other content
- Explore emerging AI and agentic approaches to create more intuitive and conversational Search experiences
- Design, implement, and evaluate machine learning solutions, taking ideas from early experimentation through production
- Partner with engineers, product managers, designers, and researchers to identify opportunities and deliver meaningful improvements to Search
- Use experimentation, data analysis, and performance metrics to understand model behavior, validate hypotheses, and improve the listener experience
- Contribute to scalable machine learning infrastructure and engineering practices
- Share knowledge, challenge assumptions constructively, and help shape the technical direction of machine learning within the squad
Requirements
- Experience building, deploying, and improving machine learning systems in production environments
- Strong understanding of machine learning approaches for information retrieval, search ranking, recommendation systems, or personalization
- Proficient in Python and comfortable working with modern machine learning frameworks and data processing tools
- Experience and a desire to lean into backend engineering at Spotify scale
- Understand how to design and evaluate experiments, interpret model performance, and translate technical findings into product improvements
- Experience working with large-scale datasets and understanding the challenges of building reliable, scalable machine learning systems
- Curious about emerging AI technologies, including large language models and agentic systems
- Enjoy working across disciplines, communicating technical ideas clearly, and learning from different perspectives
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity, taking ownership of complex challenges, and balancing experimentation with practical delivery
Conditions
- This role is based in Eastern Standard Time
- Flexibility to work where you work best, with some in-person meetings and flexibility to work from home