Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Policy & Safety

Spotify · Consumer · New York, NY · Experience

Staff Machine Learning Engineer on the Policy & Safety team at Spotify, focusing on building systems for content moderation, policy enforcement, compliance, and safety-by-default. The role involves working with detection models, collaborative and agentic features, and ensuring safety is integrated into new product experiences.

What you'd actually do

Build and ship ML models and systems that enforce Spotify's content policies at scale.
Develop and maintain the safety-by-default platform, ensuring new features are safe from the start.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Trust & Safety, Legal, Public Affairs) to integrate safety measures into product development.
Design and implement detection models for identifying policy-violating content.
Contribute to the infrastructure for content moderation and compliance pipelines.

Skills

Required

Machine Learning
System Design
Python
MLOps
Experience with large-scale data processing
Experience building and deploying ML models in production

Nice to have

Experience with agentic features
Familiarity with content moderation systems
Knowledge of regulatory compliance

What the JD emphasized

critical path of every new content type and product experience
safety is built in from the start—not added later

Other signals

policy enforcement systems
detection models
safety-by-default platform
collaborative and agentic features

Read full job description

We design Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration. Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world. That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day. If it touches a consumer, we shape it. We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify.

About the Team The Policy & Safety team sits within the Content Platform domain and builds the systems that keep Spotify safe and trustworthy at scale. We own the infrastructure behind content moderation, including detection models, policy enforcement systems, compliance pipelines, and the safety-by-default platform.

Our work sits on the critical path of every new content type and product experience—from messaging and comments to collaborative and agentic features. We partner closely with Trust & Safety, Legal, and Public Affairs to ensure that as Spotify evolves, safety is built in from the start—not added later.

What You Will Do

Who You Are

Where You Will Be

The United States base range for this position is $227,495–$324,993 USD, plus equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six-month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, and paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.