Director of ML Engineering, Conversation Product Area

Role Description

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.

Spotify's Personalization mission (PZN) is building the single intelligence layer that powers how hundreds of millions of people discover and experience audio. One agent, one reasoning engine, and one taste model, moving to a unified single stack.

We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the Conversation Product Area. The Conversation Product Area is the technical center of gravity for the shift to one Agent, building the shared Agent Engine harness and the evaluation infrastructure that supports it. The Product Area also owns the Search Brain (intent routing and search-driven conversation), the intent-detection and prompt-suggestion platform behind our agentic consumer features like Chat and AI DJ, and the Speak Platform, Spotify's first-party voice team, which spans applied research, production infrastructure, and the character/brand decisions behind every voice Spotify users hear. This is the engineering org where architecture decisions get made that power every agentic surface at the company.

You'll be working with many of Spotify's senior architects, with product leadership in the consumer AI space, and with cross-functional partners. The team needs a leader who is as comfortable making critical architectural calls as they are managing the people making them.

What You'll Do

• Own engineering execution and technical direction for the Conversation Product Area, including the Agent Engine, the evaluation infrastructure, the Search platform, the AI Voice platform (Speak), and some consumer agentic features built on top of the Agent Engine.
• Co-lead the Product Area in a paired product/engineering model, partnering with a product counterpart that owns product strategy.
• Manage a team of ~70 engineers, with a small team of Senior Engineering Managers and Staff/Principal engineers directly reporting to you.
• Drive the migration of the company’s existing agentic infrastructure onto the shared Agent Engine.
• Own the technical strategy for Spotify's first-party voice investment.
• Define and hold the technical bar on evaluation.
• Set and enforce engineering quality standards appropriate to an AI-assisted development era.
• Participate as a full member of the broader leadership group, co-developing with your peers and executives the operating model for the whole studio.
• Represent the Conversation PA's engineering point of view in high visibility, company-wide architecture and steerco conversations with senior leaders.

Qualifications

• You are deeply technical, not tech-adjacent.
• You have run large engineering orgs through platform consolidations, migrations, or evolutions.
• You have experience with at least two of: LLM-based agent systems and orchestration, evaluation/eval-infrastructure design, large-scale retrieval or search systems, or speech/voice ML systems.
• You've managed managers, not just individual contributors.
• You have a track record of building strong but nimble teams.

Requirements

• Experience evaluating architecture proposals and contributing technically.
• Ability to build a management structure that scales.
• Experience restructuring and adjusting to fast-changing priorities.

Benefits

• Health insurance.
• Six-month paid parental leave.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Monthly meal allowance.
• 23 paid days off.
• Paid flexible holidays.
• Paid sick leave.

Company Description

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.

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.