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Director, Machine Learning Engineering – Surfaces Foundation
Location
New York
Posted
34 days ago
Salary
$264.6K - $378.1K / year
Seniority
Lead
Job Description
Director, Machine Learning Engineering – Surfaces Foundation
Spotify
• 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
Job Requirements
- experience building and operating machine learning systems at scale in consumer-facing products
- worked on recommendation systems, ranking, or content delivery platforms and understand end-to-end ML workflows
- strong platform thinking, with the ability to decide when to build shared capabilities and when to keep solutions closer to product teams
- comfortable working with modern AI tools and understand how they influence software development practices
- led teams through change, supporting adoption of new technologies or ways of working
- collaborate effectively across disciplines and help create alignment across teams with different priorities
- care about building inclusive, supportive team environments and invest in the growth of others
- comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term impact
Benefits
- health insurance
- six month paid parental leave
- 401(k) retirement plan
- monthly meal allowance
- 23 paid days off
- 13 paid flexible holidays
- paid sick leave
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Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Tech Lead)
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• Design, develop, and deploy AI/ML solutions leveraging **LLMs, NLP, and Generative AI** • Build and optimize **Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)** pipelines using vector databases and embedding models • Develop **agentic AI systems** (multi-step reasoning, tool use, orchestration frameworks) • Fine-tune, prompt-engineer, and evaluate large language models for production use cases • Build scalable, end-to-end ML/AI pipelines including data ingestion, preprocessing, model training, and deployment • Integrate AI solutions into applications via APIs and microservices • Collaborate with cross-functional teams (data engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders) to define AI-driven solutions • Implement **model monitoring, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails** (bias, hallucination mitigation, safety) • Optimize models and pipelines for performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency in cloud environments • Translate complex AI outputs into actionable insights for both technical and non-technical audiences • Contribute to AI best practices, architecture decisions, and internal tooling • Mentor junior engineers and guide teams on modern AI development patterns



