Senior Applied Research Engineer - Media Quality
Posted 6 days ago
Job Description
We are looking for a Senior Applied Research Engineer who brings deep research expertise and strong engineering skills across both audio and video. In this role, you will help advance how Spotify understands, evaluates, and improves media experiences across platforms. You’ll work across the full media pipeline—from backend processing such as ingestion, encoding, and delivery to frontend playback, buffering, and synchronization—solving product problems with research discipline: structured experiments, solid metrics, and evidence-based decisions, in a real production environment.
You’ll join a team working at the intersection of media quality, perception, and engineering. The team builds applied solutions that improve how audio and video experiences perform across Spotify. By turning deep technical understanding into scalable capabilities, they help ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for hundreds of millions of users across devices and platforms.
What You'll Do
Own research-to-production work across audio/video signal processing, perceptual quality, and media intelligence.
Partner with teams to integrate prototypes into production systems and decision-making across areas like music and video information retrieval and quality-aware processing.
Work across the full media pipeline, from encoding and delivery to playback, buffering, and synchronization.
Build evaluation frameworks and support media platform and codec decisions grounded in measurement.
Design perceptual studies, develop tooling that connects quality metrics to real user experience outcomes.
Collaborate with multi-functional teams, turning research insights into scalable capabilities used across Spotify.
Help improve how we evaluate and enhance media quality across the platform.
Drive high-impact initiatives from idea through to measurable outcomes.
Who You Are
You have 8+ years of experience in applied research and engineering in media technology, audio, or video.
You bring deep expertise in audio and/or video, with working knowledge across both domains.
You understand media systems end-to-end, from backend processing through to client-side playback.
You have strong foundations in signal processing and experience with perceptual quality or feature design.
You are comfortable working in Python and have experience with C++ or similar languages.
You have experience running perceptual evaluations or quality benchmarking.
You enjoy building systems that move from research into real-world impact.
You collaborate effectively across disciplines and communicate complex ideas clearly.
You are curious, pragmatic, and motivated by solving meaningful problems.
Where You'll Be
Spotify
24 jobs posted
About the job
Similar Jobs
23d
Research Engineer, Information Quality
DeepMind
$174K - $252KMountain View, CaliforniaResearch Engineer, Information Quality
DeepMind
$174K - $252KMountain View, California23d16d
Research Engineer
Hedra
$175K - $275KSan Francisco, CAResearch Engineer
Hedra
$175K - $275KSan Francisco, CA16d16d
Research Engineer
Hedra
$175K - $275KSan Francisco, CAResearch Engineer
Hedra
$175K - $275KSan Francisco, CA16d6d
Research Engineer
Lightning AI
$180K - $250KLondon, England, United KingdomResearch Engineer
Lightning AI
$180K - $250KLondon, England, United Kingdom6d3d
Applied Scientist / Research Engineer, AI4Engineering - EMEA
Mistral
LUParisLondonMunichAmsterdamLausanneApplied Scientist / Research Engineer, AI4Engineering - EMEA
Mistral
LUParisLondonMunichAmsterdamLausanne3d22d
Research Engineer, Infrastructure
Cognition
San Francisco, CAResearch Engineer, Infrastructure
Cognition
San Francisco, CA22d16d
Research Engineer, Multimodal
Character AI
Redwood City, CAResearch Engineer, Multimodal
Character AI
Redwood City, CA16d16d
Research Engineer, LLMs
Mirage
$175K - $275KUnited StatesResearch Engineer, LLMs
Mirage
$175K - $275KUnited States16d8d
Research Engineer, Calibration
Waabi
Remote$158K - $269KSan Francisco, CAToronto, ON, CanadaPittsburgh, PARemote US & CanadaResearch Engineer, Calibration
Waabi
Remote$158K - $269KSan Francisco, CAToronto, ON, CanadaPittsburgh, PARemote US & Canada8d28d
Senior Research Engineer, Mechanical Intuition in Multimodal Models
Toyota Research Institute
$259KLos Altos, CACambridge, MASenior Research Engineer, Mechanical Intuition in Multimodal Models
Toyota Research Institute
$259KLos Altos, CACambridge, MA28d
AI jobs in your inbox
Get the latest AI jobs delivered to your inbox every week. Free, no spam.