Senior Research Scientist

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.

We are looking for a Research Lead for Spotify’s Personalization organization. Our interdisciplinary team focuses 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. As such, our team has strong ties internally to product groups as well as externally to the research community.

What you'll do:

• Create, build, and drive the Tech Research function within the London office
• Define research cluster around fundamental and applied ML research with academic and business impact
• Work closely with teams across our four main R&D locations (Boston, London, New York and Stockholm) on both research and production systems in order to drive maximum product enhancements through the use of research
• Lead lab’s effort towards long-term ambitious research goals, while identifying and accomplishing intermediate milestones
• Hire, mentor and manage a world class research group of junior and senior technical research scientists with contributions to the external research community
• Ensure strong relations with academic labs
• Act as an R&D Team Lead for the London Office and our other R&D Offices

Who you are:

• 10+ years of postdoctoral industry or academic experience
• Experience mentoring and leading a group of applied research scientists
• Strong research track record focused on:
• Foundational machine learning: reinforcement learning, contextual bandits, value functions, supervised & unsupervised learning, deep learning, representation learning, optimization, causal inference & counterfactual reasoning
• Applied machine learning in areas such as information retrieval, recommendation, computational advertising, and natural language processing
• Large scale experimentation: experimental design, adaptive experimentation methods (in particulars bandit optimization and reinforcement learning), contextual decision-making, automated A/B testing.
• Extensive publication record at peer-reviewed ML conferences (e.g. NeuRIPS, ICML, AISTATS, UAI, COLT, ICLR, AAAI, etc) as well conferences with applied ML (e.g. KDD, WSDM, WWW, CIKM, RecSys, etc).
• Experience working in multidisciplinary, collaborative environments
• Experience working closely with product teams in a leadership role
• Desire to recruit from people with diverse backgrounds or experiences

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.