About the Role
We are looking for a passionate and seasoned machine learning engineering leader to lead Spotify’s machine learning technology strategy and lead a team of approximately 80 engineers working on content personalization. You will be the most senior machine learning technologist at the company.
At Spotify, we believe that big data and machine learning are essential to match users and content in a personal and relevant way. Therefore, we think the perfect candidate has significant experience of best-in-class machine learning systems at scale with material business impact. The candidate is also able to work at the company level and effectively explain to the company lead team what needs to get done and why.
The team’s goal is to make every listening session more engaging through personalization and discovery. In this role, you’ll help multiple teams find better ways to combine our understanding of music and podcasts with our 200M+ users’ unique tastes and preferences, helping music and podcast fans listen longer, find new artists they love, and come back to Spotify more often.
The current team is around 80 engineers (rapidly growing) who work on the Spotify Home-recommendation programming (the start screen for all Spotify users), the search feature, the Spotify voice experience, content promotions, and the publishing platform that publishes content into all surfaces of Spotify.
What You’ll Do
- Reporting to the Head of Personalization, you will be a driving contributor to the Consumer Business Unit lead team, representing our machine learning technology strategy and roadmap.
- Lead and own the Spotify machine learning technology strategy, articulating needs, opportunities, and plans to the lead team.
- Drive the team forward to ensure we operate a state-of-the-art personalization technology stack.
- Work closely as part of a tight-knit team with your product and design counterparts in the Consumer Business Unit. Influence product direction through scientific and technical insights.
- Lead teams that rapidly experiment, continuously ship product improvements, and diligently measure the results.
- Incorporate advances in research into our solutions to ensure we take full advantage of the best science available.
- Attract and recruit top-tier engineers to rapidly expand the team while maintaining Spotify’s values and culture.
- Provide technical direction and guidance, as well as hands-on project leadership for major initiatives, for all product development in your team.
- Work from our NYC office (with frequent travel) to serve teams that span NYC, Boston, Stockholm, and London.
- Be part of the Personalization leadership group and participate in all strategic decisions within content personalization.
Who You Are
To be successful in this role, you have experience in the following areas:
- Significant experience building and operating large scale, state-of-the-art machine learning systems.
- You are someone who has a deep appreciation for understanding team growth and you can share this passion to motivate the team and the wider organization.
- You have a track record of building and leading effective teams in a fast-paced environment. Developing leadership and building great managers is second nature to you.
- You have experience managing >30 people engineering teams and have successfully solved many of the tough organizational challenges that follow.
- A track record of attracting and retaining world-class machine learning talent — someone that people want to work for and with.
- You have demonstrated substantial experience building and shipping well-loved machine learning based software products. You’ve had many experiences with successful product launches.
- An ability to shape strategy as part of a cross-functional leadership team, and to communicate and translate it effectively for technologists.
- Strong technical background as evidenced by multiple leadership roles of increasing seniority with a personal preference for remaining highly technical.
- You have a servant leadership mindset and you subscribe to the cultural values cherished at Spotify.