2026 Summer Internship, Research Scientist - PhD (New York City)

Spotify is looking for enthusiastic students/recent graduates with a passion for creativity and an ambition to go far. This isn't just any internship! Our paid internship program will give you the chance to gain in-depth knowledge of what it's like to be a Spotify employee as well as get the opportunity to see the technology side of a fast growing company! Our summer internships will last for approximately 10 or 12 weeks this summer and start in the middle of June.

We are looking for Research Scientist interns in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, economics, foundational modeling, and LLMs. Our teams are based in the US (East coast) and Europe working on a diverse range of research topics and applied problems. We use a variety of approaches and methods to answer research questions related to how people interact and engage with Spotify. We work on a broad range of Spotify features – personalized playlists like iDJ & Discover Weekly, Search and Recommendations, and foundational AI systems powering recommendations of music, podcasts, and audiobooks to more than 600 million users with billions of interactions.

What You'll Do:
Be part of an interdisciplinary team focused on making every user interaction with Spotify amazing through personalization and discovery, and in the process pushing innovation and contributing to the wider research community by publishing papers. Apply your scientific knowledge to application-oriented problems in artificial intelligence, economics, machine learning, search and recommendation, speech processing, and natural language processing, combining insights from your expertise with those of our diverse team of research scientists.  Be a valued member of an autonomous, multi-functional team working in collaboration with other scientists, engineers, product managers, designers, user researchers, and analysts across Spotify to design creative solutions to challenging problems. Help to develop thoughtful, efficient, and intuitive new ways to search, explore and discover music, podcasts, and audiobooks. 

Who You Are:
You are pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Information Science, Economics, Statistics, or related areas with a strong computational focus. Strong preference for a graduation year date of 2026 or 2027. You currently have valid work authorization to work in the country in which this role is based that will extend from June to September 2026. You are available from June 15th onwards for a 10 or 12 week summer internship . You have publications in communities such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EC, AAAI, RecSys, The Web Conference, ACL, SIGIR, WSDM, KDD, Interspeech, or related venues (preferred) You are a creative problem-solver who is passionate about digging into complex problems and devising innovative ways to reach results (preferred) You have experience with the complexities of modeling and analyzing real-world data (preferred)

Where You'll Be:
This role will be in New York City. Our internship program has a lot to offer with in office events and networking opportunities. To allow you to be fully immersed in our program and make the most of your time with us, we ask that you come into the office 3 days a week.

The United States hourly rate for this position is $55 USD and is overtime eligible. These rates may be modified in the future. The role is eligible for select benefits such as Paid Public Holidays, and Learning and Development Trainings.

Our paid research science summer internships last for approximately 10 or 12 weeks and start at the middle of June. The last day to apply is February 5th 2026 at 12 PM ET.

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.
Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.