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AI Music Recommendation Engineer

Victoria Nakamura

Freelance · Job · Los_Angeles

About the role

Our audio platform has 8 million tracks and 400,000 daily active listeners. The recommendation engine behind the "Discover" tab drives 35% of all listening sessions — but its cold-start problem is embarrassing. New tracks with fewer than 100 plays get almost zero recommendation exposure, which frustrates independent artists and hurts catalog diversity. We're hiring a freelance recommendation engineer to redesign the cold-start strategy. The core idea: combine audio embeddings (we already extract them) with metadata signals and early engagement patterns to generate meaningful recommendations for tracks from day one. You'll prototype, A/B test, and iterate until cold-start tracks achieve at least 60% of the engagement rate of established tracks. This is a 6-month freelance engagement, 30-35 hours per week. You'll work asynchronously with our product and data teams, with a weekly sync to review metrics and prioritize experiments.

Responsibilities

  • Redesign the recommendation engine's cold-start strategy
  • Build hybrid recommendation models combining audio embeddings and metadata
  • Design and analyze A/B tests to measure recommendation quality
  • Optimize candidate generation and ranking for 8M+ track catalog
  • Document model architecture decisions and experiment results
  • Deliver weekly progress reports with metrics and next steps

Requirements

  • 3+ years building recommendation systems at scale
  • Experience with collaborative filtering, content-based, and hybrid approaches
  • Strong A/B testing and experimental design skills
  • Proficiency in Python, SQL, and distributed computing with Spark
  • Familiarity with audio or media domain is a plus but not required

Benefits

  • Fully remote freelance — set your own hours
  • Competitive hourly rate based on experience
  • Access to production data and compute resources
  • Potential extension based on results

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Categories

AI & Machine Learning Engineers data science & analytics

Skills

python pytorch sql spark aws

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Job Type

Freelance

Level

Mid-Level

Language

English

Salary Range

$80k – $100k / year

AI Expertise

AI & Machine Learning Engineers data science & analytics

Skills

python pytorch sql spark aws statistics

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