Director, Machine Learning Engineering – Surfaces Foundation

Spotify
Washington, US
Remote

Job Description

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

Skills & Requirements

Technical Skills

Machine learningRecommendation systemsRankingContent delivery platformsAi-assisted development toolsLeadershipCollaborationTeam buildingInclusivityAmbiguity navigationDecision makingAiPlatform engineeringConsumer products

Employment Type

FULL TIME

Level

senior

Posted

4/28/2026

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