Senior Machine Learning Engineering Manager

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 ask that our team members be physically located in Central European time or Eastern Standard/Daylight time zones for the purposes of our collaboration hours.


The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Discover Weekly to AI DJ, 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 – and providing valuable context – to each and every one of them.


Do you want to help Spotify invent new personalized sessions with generative voice AI to delight users? 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.


What you’ll do
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.



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.



Where You’ll Be
For this role there will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home. We ask that you come into the London office approximately 1 time per week.



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.