Senior Research Engineer - Music Job at Spotify in New York

We are seeking a Senior 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 put artists and songwriters first through four guiding principles:

• Partnerships with record labels, distributors, and music publishers: We’re developing new products for artists and fans through upfront agreements, not by asking for forgiveness later.
• Choice in participation: Artists and rights holders will choose if and how to participate, ensuring AI tools align with the values of those behind the music.
• Fair compensation and new revenue: We build products that create new revenue streams for right holders, artists, and songwriters, ensuring proper compensation and transparent credit for their work.
• Artist‑fan connection: AI tools will not replace human artistry; they will give artists new ways to be creative and to connect with fans, deepening the artist‑fan bond across the 700+ million monthly listeners on our platform.

For more information, see the press release: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-10-16/artist-first-ai-music-spotify-collaboration

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate closely with research scientists to turn new research ideas into well‑engineered experiments, ensuring efficiency, clarity, and reproducibility.
• 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 speed experiments and production systems.
• Integrate models into production environments, working directly with platform and product teams to deploy models to hundreds of millions of users.
• Translate state‑of‑the‑art research into robust, well‑engineered prototypes.
• Maintain a high‑quality codebase by enforcing clear structure, consistency, and testing practices in 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.

Who You Are

• Experienced in training or fine‑tuning large machine learning models on GPUs using PyTorch or similar frameworks.
• Familiar with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure.
• Proficient at debugging machine learning training code.
• Communicates effectively with global teams and works both face‑to‑face and asynchronously across continents.
• Skilled at optimizing code for performance, maximizing GPU utilization.
• Rapidly learns new concepts and stays up‑to‑date with the fast pace of machine learning and AI.
• Resourceful and proactive, seeking solutions through research, experimentation, and collaboration when faced with blockers.
• Comfortable with low‑level debugging tools such as lldb and NVIDIA Nsight (a plus).
• Has a solid grasp of computer science concepts including type systems, compilers, parallelism, thread safety, and encapsulation.
• Interested in audio processing and music information retrieval, excited about building products that leverage these technologies.

Where You’ll Be

• Flexibility to work where best fits; this role is open within the North America region.
• The team operates in Eastern Standard Time; core working hours are CET 3pm‑6pm / EST 9am‑12pm.

Compensation & Benefits

The United States base range for this position is $176,166 – $251,666 plus equity. Benefits include health insurance, six‑month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, a monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, and 13 paid flexible holidays.

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. … We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know – we’re here to support you in any way we can.