Director, Machine Learning Engineering - Surfaces Foundation

Requirements

• You have experience building and operating machine learning systems at scale in consumer-facing products
• You have worked on recommendation systems, ranking, or content delivery platforms and understand end-to-end ML workflows
• You bring strong platform thinking, with the ability to decide when to build shared capabilities and when to keep solutions closer to product teams
• You are comfortable working with modern AI tools and understand how they influence software development practices
• You have led teams through change, supporting adoption of new technologies or ways of working
• You collaborate effectively across disciplines and help create alignment across teams with different priorities
• You care about building inclusive, supportive team environments and invest in the growth of others
• You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term impact

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead and support engineering managers and their teams building platform systems for personalized recommendations across Spotify
• Set and evolve the technical vision for foundational capabilities, including targeting, serving, evaluation, and agent-driven systems
• Make thoughtful decisions about what should become platform capabilities, ensuring teams can move quickly without unnecessary complexity
• Guide incremental platform evolution, enabling continuous delivery rather than large, disruptive rewrites
• Partner closely with product, data science, and engineering leaders to align priorities across multiple squads
• Stay close to the technology when needed, contributing to architecture decisions and resolving complex production challenges
• Encourage adoption of AI-assisted development tools and shape how teams use them effectively in day-to-day work
• Hire, develop, and grow engineering leaders and individual contributors, building a strong and inclusive team culture

Where You'll Be

• This role is based in London
• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in-person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home.