[Hiring] Staff Research Engineer @Spotify

Role Description

We are seeking a Staff Research Engineer to join our Artist-First AI Music lab. Our team pioneers and advances state-of-the-art generative technologies for music that create breakthrough experiences for fans and artists. We invent entirely new listening experiences that center and celebrate artists and creatives. All of our products will put artists and songwriters first, through these four principles:

• Partnerships with record labels, distributors, and music publishers: We’ll develop new products for artists and fans through upfront agreements, not by asking for forgiveness later.
• Choice in participation: We recognize there’s a wide range of views on use of generative music tools within the artistic community. Therefore, artists and rightsholders will choose if and how to participate to ensure the use of AI tools aligns with the values of the people behind the music.
• Fair compensation and new revenue: We will build products that create wholly new revenue streams for rightsholders, artists, and songwriters, ensuring they are properly compensated for uses of their work and transparently credited for their contributions.
• Artist-fan connection: AI tools we develop will not replace human artistry. They will give artists new ways to be creative and connect with fans. We will leverage our role as the place where more than 700 million people already come to listen to music every month to ensure that generative AI deepens artist-fan connections.

For more information, see this press release! Press Release

Qualifications

• Experience training or fine-tuning large machine learning models on GPUs using PyTorch or similar frameworks.
• Experience working with cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Microsoft Azure.
• Understanding of how to debug problems in machine learning training code.
• Effective communication with global teams, ready to work both face-to-face and asynchronously with collaborators on multiple continents.
• Experience optimizing code for performance and can make GPUs “go brrr” (train at maximum efficiency).
• Ability to learn new concepts and technologies quickly and keep up to date with the rapid pace of development in machine learning and AI.
• Resourceful and proactive; seeks out solutions through research, experimentation, and collaboration when faced with blockers.
• Comfortable working with low-level debugging tools like lldb, NVIDIA Nsight, or similar.
• Solid grasp of computer science concepts like type systems, compilers, parallelism, thread safety, encapsulation, and the like.
• Interest in learning more about audio processing and music information retrieval.

Requirements

• Closely collaborate with research scientists.
• Work side-by-side to turn new research ideas into well-engineered experiments, ensuring efficiency, clarity, and reproducibility in every implementation.
• Improve model training pipelines by debugging distributed training, optimizing data loading at massive scale, and ensuring smooth scaling across compute environments.
• Optimize performance by profiling and accelerating existing training and inference code to make experiments faster and production systems more responsive.
• Integrate models into production environments by working directly with platform and product teams to deploy models into the hands of hundreds of millions of Spotify’s users.
• Incorporate state-of-the-art research by translating models and techniques described in the literature into robust, well-engineered prototypes.
• Maintain a high-quality codebase by enforcing clear structure, consistency, and testing practices to support long-term maintainability on a codebase shared between members of a fast-paced globally distributed team.
• Enhance researcher experience by building internal tooling, libraries, and workflows to make experimentation, debugging, and deployment more efficient for the whole team.

Benefits

• Flexibility to work where you work best within the North Americas region.
• Core working hours are CET 3pm-6pm / EST 9am-12pm.
• United States base range for this position is $215,136 - $307,337 plus equity.
• Health insurance.
• Six month paid parental leave.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Monthly meal allowance.
• 23 paid days off.
• 13 paid flexible holidays.