Research Scientist - Podcast Search & Recommendation

Key Skills

Python Programming, Scala Programming, C++, Java Programming, Machine learning techniques, Data science techniques, SQL, Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, TensorFlow, PyTorch, R Programming

Job Description

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Daily Mix 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.

Spotify Lab Locations - London, New York, and eligible remote offices

Spotify’s mission is 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.

We are looking for Research Scientists for Spotify’s Personalization organization. Personalization is a high impact team that is building the next generation technologies aimed at making every user interaction with Spotify amazing through personalization and discovery. Our goal is to deliver the right content to the right user at the right time in order to maximize user satisfaction.

You will be part of an interdisciplinary team investigating ways to advance audio personalization and discovery by means of semantic search and recommendation solutions. The team conducts foundational research in information extraction, knowledge representation, content understanding as well as in information retrieval and recommendation systems. The main focus is on leveraging the knowledge encoded in data in order to improve the users’ audio search, recommendation, and browsing experiences.

Areas of expertise: Information Retrieval, Recommendation System, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning Applied to Search and Recommendation, Representation Learning

What You'll Do

• You will participate in applied and fundamental research in information retrieval, recommendation system, language technologies, knowledge management, semantic search and knowledge-based recommendation
• You will apply your scientific knowledge to analyze and collect data, perform analyses, identify problems, devise solutions and construct methodologies, including metrics and best practices, and conduct experiments to validate these
• You will conduct applied research in search, recommendation, voice and other areas related to music and podcasts
• You will work in collaboration with other research scientists, product managers, engineers, designers, user researchers, and data analysts across Spotify to design creative solutions to challenging problems
• You will have product impact, while working on and furthering development of a long-term research roadmap
• You will maintain a presence in the research community through external engagement such as publishing papers, giving talks, and being an active community member at top conferences

Who You Are

• You have a PhD in one of computer science, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, data science or related areas
• You will have a strong knowledge in one of the following areas: machine learning, information retrieval, recommender system, natural language processing, optimization techniques, knowledge management, offline / online evaluation methodology or data mining
• You have publications in research communities such as WSDM, WWW, RecSys, SIGIR, KDD, ISWC, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, or related
• You possess solid hands-on skills in sourcing, cleaning, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing and modeling of real data
• You have a passion for making sense of user behavior, especially podcast and music 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

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.

Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is 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 chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with a community of more than 345 million users.