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, podcasts, and listeners better than anyone else and by leveraging the latest in Generative AI. Join us and you’ll give millions of listeners great music and talk experiences, personalized to each and every one of them.
The AI Foundation team within Personalization provides the state-of-the-art foundational data and tech with which we are inventing and shipping new interactive, personalized listening experiences. This is a team of about a hundred AI/ML Engineers, Applied Research Scientists, Product Managers, and domain experts.
You’ll join the Zeitgeist squad within the AI Foundation team. We focus on building the systems and models that help Spotify understand culture in real time—what’s trending, why it matters, and how it shapes listening. You’ll leverage large language models and agentic workflows, and work closely with engineers, data scientists, and product partners to turn signals into meaningful user experiences. This is an exciting mix of platform-level content understanding and experience-level user presentation.
What You'll Do
Design, build, and ship agentic systems that ground personalized listening experiences in cultural context and world knowledge, used by hundreds of millions of Spotify users
Develop and maintain pipelines for extracting, structuring, and serving cultural signals at scale, leveraging LLMs and agentic workflows
Partner closely with teams across Personalization to integrate foundational cultural data and tech into new agentic listening experiences
Own components end-to-end — from data pipelines and model training to production serving and monitoring
Design and build evaluation tooling (including LLM-as-judge frameworks and dataset analysis), and run experiments to evaluate the impact of cultural context signals on user experience and engagement
Help define the technical direction of the squad, contributing to architecture decisions, and shaping what building "0-to-1" experiences looks like in practice
Who You Are
You have 5+ years of experience building and shipping machine learning models end-to-end
You have a strong foundation in Python (Java and Scala are a plus) and experienced with GCP tools (e.g. Dataflow, BigQuery)
You have hands-on experience with LLMs and agent orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic), building tool-calling agents, RAG, and vector databases
You have built and shipped production-scale, data-driven AI/ML systems, ideally in content understanding, knowledge graphs, NLP, MIR, or related domains
You are excited but not overhyped by the potential of Generative AI
You're comfortable operating as a 0-to-1 builder — you thrive in ambiguous, exploratory spaces and can move from idea to experimentation to production with confidence
You care about building inclusive, user-centric products, and you think about AI and ML in the context of products and user impact, not just tech
You have worked effectively in collaborative, cross-functional environments
You care deeply about code quality, reliability, and scalability
Where You'll Be
This role is based in New York
We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home
