Summer Internship, Research Scientist in Personalization

Key Skills

Computational Algorithms, Human Computer Interaction- HCI, Information Retrieval, Machine learning techniques, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Recommendation Systems, Search Relevancy, Personalization

Job Description

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. We built them by understanding the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else. Join us and you’ll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them.

We are looking for Research Scientist interns who have applied experience in machine learning, recommender systems, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, computational social science, knowledge management, information retrieval, and related fields. Our teams span six research labs based in the US (east coast) and Europe working on a diverse range of research topics and applied problems. We use a variety of approaches and methods to answer research questions related to how people interact and engage with Spotify. We work on a broad range of Spotify features such as personalized playlists (Discover Weekly and Daily Mix), the Homepage, Search, and other ML systems powering recommendations of music and podcasts to more than 450 million users with billions of interactions.

What You'll Do

• Join an interdisciplinary team passionate about making every user interaction with Spotify outstanding through personalization and discovery and in the process pushing innovation and contributing to the wider research community by publishing papers.
• Apply your scientific knowledge to application-oriented problems in search and recommendation, information extraction, knowledge representation, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, computational social science, and more broadly machine learning, combining insights from your expertise with those of our diverse team of research scientists.
• Be a valued member of an autonomous, multi-functional team working in collaboration with other scientists, engineers, product managers, designers, user researchers, and analysts across Spotify to craft creative solutions to challenging problems.
• Help to develop thoughtful, efficient, and intuitive new ways to search, explore and discover audio content.

Who You Are

• You are pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Information Science, Data Science, Statistics, or related areas with a strong computational focus.
• You currently have valid work authorization to work in the country in which this role is based that will extend from June to August 2023
• You have publications in communities such as the Web Conference, SIGIR, CHI, ACL, NeurIPS, WSDM, EMNLP, RecSys, KDD, IUI, CIKM, CSCW, ICWSM, ISWC, AAAI, ICML, ICLR, UIST, Ubicomp or related venues.
• You are curious about how interaction design, data collection strategies, and people’s perceptions affect Machine Learning outcomes.
• You are a creative problem-solver who is passionate about digging into complex problems and devising innovative ways to reach results.
• You have experience with the complexities of real-world data, and understand the value of both in-depth, qualitative, and web-scale, quantitative data working together to build a deep understanding of people’s interaction with technology.

Where You'll Be

• We are a distributed workforce enabling our band members to find a work mode that is best for them!
• Where in the world? For this role, it can be within the Americas region in which we have a work location and is within working hours: https://lifeatspotify.com/locations
• Working hours? We operate within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration and ask that all be located in that time zone. 
• Prefer an office to work from home instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here.

Our paid summer internships last for 10-13 weeks and start at the beginning of June.

The United States hourly rate for this position is 58.00 USD per hour plus a one time intern stipend of 2,253 USD and is overtime eligible. This rate may be modified in the future.