Senior Machine Learning Engineering Manager, Spotify
Personalization
More information about location
1+ day a week in office
Commercial music streaming service
Open for applications
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Open for applications
More information about location
1+ day a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it
Role
Who you are
- You have significant expertise in and deep passion for generative voice and speech
- Or, you have significant experience in modern generative audio and are willing to make voice and speech your passion
- You have demonstrated the ability to lead a text-to-speech or modern generative AI audio team (e.g. transformers, diffusion and other recent technologies) to incorporate generative AI into consumer facing products, continuously making the models better for users while optimizing performance and cost
- You practice servant leadership, have strong mentorship and coaching skills, and thrive when helping individuals and teams perform to their full potential
- You love facilitating collaboration among several teams, developing and growing teams and their leaders while driving delivery
- You are able to distill complex information into easy-to-understand concepts, and understand how to lead a team through ambiguity
- You thrive when bringing research to market as amazing products for users
What the job involves
- The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend to Discover Weekly, we’re behind some of Spotify’s most-loved features
- In this role, you will provide leadership to Spotify’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) team, Speak, to create generated voice audio that enriches users’ experience of music and podcast recommendations
- Be accountable for the Speak team’s delivery of new voice experiences at the heart of music and podcast sessions users love
- Together with a wide range of collaborators, develop a generative voice AI vision and strategy that keeps Spotify at the forefront of innovation in the field
- Provide servant leadership to ~20 applied research scientists, machine learning engineers, engineering and research managers, backend engineers, and data specialists
- Advocate for and increase knowledge of advanced voice capabilities across the company, including influencing the company’s most senior leaders
- Cultivate a balanced, collaborative engineering culture and a diverse and inclusive team that reflects our customers and our world
- Directly manage ~5-10 people
- Collaborate with a product lead to define strategy, success metrics and roadmaps
- Influence the technical design and architecture of the Speak team’s stack
- Collaborate with leaders throughout the company to plan and execute impactful initiatives requiring many teams
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Spotify was founded in an attempt to combat the rampant music piracy that was causing significant harm to the industry. The company has since taken music streaming mainstream and now has 180m+ paying subscribers across the world.
With features that include a highly accessible interface and a vast catalogue of artists, Spotify's strong brand has been able to maintain growth in spite of fierce competition from deep-pocketed rivals like Amazon and Apple. The company has achieved this by making smart acquisitions to move into other verticals to strengthen its offerings, especially podcasting, by acquiring Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.
Spotify's future plans include rapid growth with a goal to become a one-stop destination for all digital sound, as well as AI and NFT integrations. However, high costs incurred from the acquisition of exclusive podcasts, increasing competitor strength, and weak bottom-line growth mean that the company must find a balance to maintain its position in the sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist
Insights
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Jan 2016
$1bn
CONVERTIBLE
Jun 2015
$526m
SERIES G
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company 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 - fully paid - 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
Company values
- Innovative: We move fast and take big risks
- Sincere: We have no time for internal politics
- Passionate: We revel in what we do
- Collaborative: We recognise that we're all in this together
- Playful: We don't take ourselves too seriously
Company HQ
Norrmalm, Stockholm, Stockholms län
Articles
Leadership
Daniel Ek
(CEO & Chairman)Founded Spotify in 2006. Previously worked as an executive at Tradera, an auction company that was sold to eBay and was briefly the CEO of uTorrent.
People progressing
Joined as a Conversion Manager in the Growth Team. Promoted three times over seven years to Senior Director - Head of Growth.
Joined as a Customer Advisor. Since then has had the role titles Senior Advisor, Content Associate, Team Coach, and Operations Manager - Primary Support. Hurst is now currently the Business Operations Manager of Music.
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