Lead Machine Learning Engineer
Universal Music Group1 day ago
Santa Monica, CA, USASenior
Base Salary
$200k - $250k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead ML and AI initiatives from problem framing and data assessment through deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and adoption.
- Build and operate reliable ML and LLM-powered workflows involving retrieval, grounding, structured outputs, tool and API integrations, orchestration, inference, and safe rollback.
- Establish AI evaluation and observability using test sets, regression tests, human review, traces, drift detection, latency, quality, safety, usage, and cost metrics.
- Build and operate data and feature pipelines using streaming consumption, release metadata, social campaign, catalog, and commercial finance data.
- Develop and operate models for personalization, recommender systems, search and ranking, time-series forecasting, anomaly detection, and decision support.
- Move generative and multimodal AI capabilities from prototypes into dependable workflows for business decisions.
- Partner with ML scientists, data engineers, product managers, designers, domain experts, A&R, Marketing, Finance, and labels.
- Contribute to architecture, code reviews, documentation, mentoring, and build-versus-buy decisions.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or advanced degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Typically 5+ years of experience in software, machine learning, data, or platform engineering with ownership of production systems and ambiguous, high-impact problems.
- Experience engineering modern AI systems, including LLM workflows, retrieval, grounding, structured generation, tool use, safety controls, human review, evaluation, and monitoring.
- Strong Python and software engineering skills, including testing, code review, version control, debugging, maintainable design, and a second production language or equivalent systems experience.
- Experience with cloud-based data and ML platforms, data pipelines, distributed systems, APIs, services, workflow orchestration, model serving, batch or online inference, and refresh or retraining processes.
- Ability to collaborate across technical and business disciplines, communicate tradeoffs, take ownership without formal authority, and favor simpler reliable solutions.
- Experience in music, media, entertainment, streaming marketplaces, advertising, or rapidly changing consumer-behavior industries is especially valuable.
- Experience with complex non-tabular data such as audio, text, images, or video; decision-support products; model governance; data provenance; copyright safety; human-in-the-loop review; or trust and safety systems is especially valuable.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, including 100% coverage for outpatient in-network mental health services.
- Fertility coverage for eligible medical plan participants.
- Wellbeing reimbursements for fitness classes, spa treatments, meal services, travel, and more, up to $720 per year.
- Student loan repayment assistance and tuition reimbursement.
- 401(k) with 100% immediate vesting on the first 5% of employee contributions, plus an additional UMG contribution.
- Flexible PTO for exempt employees, three weeks of PTO for non-exempt employees, a two-week paid winter break, and 10 company holidays.
- Summer Fridays between Memorial Day and Labor Day and generous paid parental leave.
- UMG is an E-Verify employer in specified states but is not enrolled in California and New York and cannot support candidates whose employer must enroll in E-Verify, such as candidates on STEM-OPT.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group is a public music-entertainment company that produces, distributes, and licenses recorded music; operates music publishing; and runs artist merchandising and audiovisual content businesses. It owns labels such as Interscope, Republic, Def Jam, Capitol, and Deutsche Grammophon, and works across more than 60 countries. Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, it is listed on Euronext Amsterdam and generates revenue from streaming and physical sales, licensing, publishing royalties, and merchandise.