Director of Research, Large Language Models | Life at Spotify

Large Language Models
Engineering
Tech Research
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.
Location
Job type
Permanent
Spotify has more than 400M listeners in more than 180 markets around the world, who use our music, podcast, and audiobook services to find what delights, entertains, educates, and informs them. Personalization provides the technology to serve them what they expect to find, to help them explore and find new things to enjoy, and for us to suggest things they might not be aware of that they would like. 
We are looking for a Director of Research to help us define and build the next generation of personalized listening experiences. You will be responsible for a team of research scientists who focus on innovating the Spotify experience through researching and developing state-of-the-art language technologies such as large language models. The developed technologies will power the personalization engine of Spotify to provide a better user experience and surface the content to individual users that maximizes their long-term satisfaction.
We like to say "Listening is everything" and in consequence we have broadened our offering to include podcasts in addition to music, and quite recently to include audiobooks as well. This is where you come in! Processing speech content needs new technologies, and you will be part of an interdisciplinary team focusing 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 and contributing to the wider research community by publishing papers. Our team has strong ties internally to product groups as well as externally to the research community.
Spotify lives by its values - Innovative, Sincere, Creative, Passionate, Playful. For us, these are more than just words on a page — these principles guide each decision we make, serving as the path we’ll follow to achieve our goals and mission. These values help us build trust with our users, creators, advertisers, partners, and even amongst ourselves. They ensure that we are the same company that stands for the same things no matter our audience. Read more about them in our manifesto: https://www.lifeatspotify.com/being-here/the-band-manifesto .
What You'll Do
Lead a language technologies research team towards long-term ambitious research goals, while identifying and accomplishing intermediate milestones
Define a research cluster around fundamental and applied language technologies research with academic and business impact
Serve as a member of the research leads team to advise the Head of Tech Research on strategic vision and cross-Spotify impact
Hire, mentor, and lead a world class research lab of scientists as support them with learning and growing
Work closely with product teams across a range of R&D locations (New York City, Boston, London, Stockholm, Amsterdam) to identify research opportunities and drive maximum product improvements
Collaborate with research teams across Spotify to tackle company initiatives and drive substantial change
Who You Are
You have extensive experience leading industry research labs
You have extensive experience leading a team of research scientists
You have a strong research track record in cutting edge research in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, with a focus on Large Language Models
You have an extensive publication record at peer-reviewed research forums such as ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR, NeurIPS, ICML, WSDM, WWW, RecSys, KDD, AAAI, or related
You are a great communicator. You can explain complex topics in simple terms, and you love building strong relationships with colleagues and partners
You have a strong delivery-focused approach to research, ideally with experience transferring research projects into industry products
You are passionate about teamwork, coaching, and building a collaborative research environment
You have experience working in multidisciplinary, collaborative environments
You have experience working closely with product teams in a leadership role
You have the desire to recruit from people with diverse backgrounds or experiences
Where You'll Be
We are a distributed workforce enabling our band members to find a work mode that is best for them!
Where in the world? For this role, it can be within the US or Europe anywhere where we have a work location and which is within working hours. 
Working hours? We operate within the Central European and EST time zones for collaboration and ask that all be located in that time zone. 
Prefer an office to work from home instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here ( https://spotifyjobs.com/work-from-anywhere ).