Research Scientist, Personalization

Spotify has more than 600M listeners in more than 180 markets around the world, who use our music, podcast, and audiobook services to find what delights, entertains, educates, and informs them. Personalization is a high impact organization that provides the technology to serve them what they expect to find, to help them explore and find new things to enjoy, and to suggest things they might not be aware of that they would like.

We are looking for a Research Scientist with a machine learning background to help us improve personalization experiences. You will join a team of researchers whose focus is on enhancing the Spotify experience by researching, developing, and integrating state‑of‑the‑art generative AI technologies into our search and recommender systems, and unlock new interactive experiences.

You will be part of an interdisciplinary team focusing on ensuring that the foundations of Spotify technologies are at or above the state of the art and, in the process, redefine the state of the art for the field and contribute to the wider research community by publishing papers. Our team has strong ties internally to product groups as well as externally to the research community.

Areas of expertise: Information Retrieval, Recommendation System, Language Technologies, Foundational Models, Generative AI Technologies, and Machine Learning

What You’ll Do:

• Participate in groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence with a focus on large‑scale generative applications to search and recommendation systems.
• Apply your scientific knowledge to analyze and collect data, identify problems, construct methodologies, including metrics and standard processes, conduct experiments, and devise scalable solutions through hands‑on prototyping and development.
• Work on practical applications such as search, recommendation, language understanding in the music and talk audio domains.
• Collaborate with other scientists, engineers, product managers, designers, and data analysts across Spotify to design and develop innovative solutions to challenging problems.
• Impact Spotify products, while working on and iterating further a long‑term research roadmap.
• Maintain a research profile through external engagement by publishing scientific papers, coordinating workshops, giving talks, and being an active community member at top conferences.

Who You Are:

• You have a PhD in either information retrieval, intelligent systems, machine learning, computer science, or related areas.
• You have expertise in domains such as language technologies, generative AI technologies, information retrieval, and recommender systems.
• You have peer‑reviewed publications at journals or conferences such as RecSys, TheWebConf, WSDM, SIGIR, EMNLP, ACL, COLM, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, or related.
• You have solid hands‑on skills in sourcing, cleaning, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing, and modeling of large‑scale real data.
• You are passionate about making sense of user behavior, music content, and talk audio content using best available methods.
• You are a creative problem‑solver who is passionate about digging into complex problems and devising new approaches to reach results.

Where You’ll Be: This role is based in London or Stockholm. We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in‑person meetings, but still allow for flexibility to work from home.

Benefits:

• Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse.
• Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success.
• Global parental leave, six months off - for all new parents.
• All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self‑care hub.
• Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs.

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer.