Machine Learning Engineering Manager II

What You'll Do: Lead and grow a team of machine learning, backend, and data engineers, supporting their development and helping them deliver their best work.Shape the team's technical strategy and execution, ensuring engineering efforts align with listener needs and Spotify's broader business goals. Guide the development of machine learning and recommendation systems that balance multiple objectives across personalized listening experiences. Collaborate with Product and engineering partners to define priorities, align on outcomes, and translate complex challenges into clear plans. Support the team in making thoughtful technical decisions across experimentation, scalability, system reliability, and model performance. Create a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement, where engineers feel empowered to experiment and learn. Drive effective planning and delivery while balancing immediate priorities with long-term technical health. Foster an inclusive, supportive team environment through coaching, feedback, and thoughtful people leadership. Who You Are: You have experience managing and developing engineering teams, with a track record of helping people grow and delivering impactful results. You bring a strong technical background in machine learning, software engineering, or related areas, and can confidently guide technical conversations. You understand the opportunities and challenges of developing and operating machine learning systems in production. You have experience working with cross-functional partners to define priorities, navigate trade-offs, and deliver against shared goals. You are comfortable leading teams through ambiguity and helping engineers make informed technical decisions. You care about building inclusive, collaborative environments where people feel supported and empowered. You communicate with clarity, lead with empathy, and know how to balance people, technology, and business needs Where You'll Be: We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location. This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.