Director, Machine Learning Engineering – Surfaces Foundation

Job Description:

• 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

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