Your space-enabled career begins here

Who We Are

SiriusXM and its brands (Pandora, SXM Media, AdsWizz, Simplecast, and SiriusXM Connected Vehicle Services) are leading a new era of audio entertainment and services by delivering the most compelling subscription and ad-supported audio entertainment experience for listeners -- in the car, at home, and anywhere on the go with connected devices. Our vision is to shape the future of audio, where everyone can be effortlessly connected to the voices, stories and music they love wherever they are. Our platforms collectively reach approximately 150 million listeners, the largest digital audio audience across paid and free tiers in North America, and deliver music, sports, talk, news, comedy, entertainment and podcasts. Pandora, a subsidiary of SiriusXM, is the largest ad-supported audio entertainment streaming service in the U.S.

This is the place where a diverse group of emerging talent and legends alike come to share authentic and purposeful songs, stories, sounds and insights through some of the best programming and technology in the world. Our critically-acclaimed, industry-leading audio entertainment encompasses music, sports, comedy, news, talk, live events, and podcasting. No matter their individual role, each of our employees plays a vital part in bringing SiriusXM’s vision to life every day.

Do you love machine learning, personalization, natural language processing, and helping people discover their next favorite artist, station, or podcast? If so, the Foundation, Search, and Voice Science team might be a great place for you! We are a team of applied scientists and ML engineers who love to advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning to improve interactive discovery in Pandora and SiriusXM.

How You’ll Make An Impact

We are looking for a lead scientist to build the best music, podcast, and sports search in the world. As the “front door” of personalization and discovery, Search helps millions of listeners fall in love with the depth of our content catalog across Pandora and SiriusXM.

In this Principal-level role, you will leverage your expertise in machine learning, information retrieval, ranking, natural language processing, and recommendations to define the scientific roadmap, mentor colleagues, research novel methods, and build machine learning systems for Search.

What You’ll Do

• Define the scientific roadmap for Search products across Pandora and SiriusXM.
• Drive the technical direction of cross-functional product development projects.
• Coordinate the work of multiple applied scientists and machine learning engineers, providing research guidance and mentorship, across the search and voice scientific programs.
• Research, design, experiment with, and build high-impact machine learning systems for search and voice.
• Understand and contribute to state-of-the-art methods in areas like query understanding, natural language processing and understanding (NLP/NLU), conversational recommendation, semantic retrieval, personalization, counterfactual experimentation, learning-to-rank, generative and explainable AI.
• Promote and role-model best practices of data science, engineering, and communication throughout the organization.
• This role does not have direct supervisory responsibilities.
  
  

What You’ll Need

We look for candidates who strive to push the state-of-the-art in applied research domains like information retrieval, learning to rank, natural language processing, document embedding, semantic search, personalization, dialog management, and natural language generation.

• Ph.D. or M.S.in a quantitative field, plus zero, or two years of industry experience, respectively.
• 5+ additional years of research and development experience in real-world information retrieval, search, NLU/P, or voice/dialog systems.
• Applied expertise in machine-learning-based information retrieval, learning-to-rank, and/or contemporary neural network techniques (e.g., transformers, GNNs).
• Expertise with ML-frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, Vowpal Wabbit, scikit-learn).
• Production experience implementing machine learning pipelines and models at scale in Python, Java, Scala, or similar languages.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical decisions and teams, including mentoring scientists and coordinating with Product and Engineering partners.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to effectively advocate technical solutions to scientists, engineers, and product audiences.
• Passion for data-driven research, development, and experimentation.
• Self-motivated, growth-oriented, and driven to pursue solutions to challenging problems.
• Must have legal right to work in the U.S.
  
  

Bonus Skills

• Demonstrated scientific excellence through publishing in first-tier conferences (e.g., SigIR, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).
• Proficiency with distributed processing, warehousing, and orchestration frameworks (e.g., Spark, Hive, Airflow, etc.).
• Experience with any of the following:
• Cloud computing: Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Azure.
• Additional ML concepts: Reinforcement learning, Recommender Systems, Causal Inference.
• MLOps tools and practices: feature stores (e.g. Feast), ML pipelines (e.g., TFX/MLFlow/Kubeflow), continuous retraining, serving (e.g., TFServing/KFServing).
  

At SiriusXM, we carefully consider a wide range of factors when determining compensation, including your background and experience. These considerations can cause your compensation to vary. We expect the base salary for this position to be in the range of $196,000.00 to $285,000.00 and will depend on your skills, qualifications, and experience. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives. We encourage all interested candidates to apply.

Our goal at SiriusXM is to provide and maintain a work environment that fosters mutual respect, professionalism and cooperation. SiriusXM is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, age, disability or handicap, sex, gender identity, marital status, familial status, veteran status, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

The requirements and duties described above may be modified or waived by the Company in its sole discretion without notice.

R-2023-07-60