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

Spotify is looking for enthusiastic students/recent graduates with a passion for audiobooks, podcasts or music 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 exceptional Research Scientist interns who have applied experience in AI, LLMs, machine learning, natural language processing, audio and video analysis, network science, computational social science, knowledge extraction or related fields. Our research labs are based in the US East Coast and London, and this internship will be based in the New York office. We develop novel and rigorous approaches to understand audiovisual content, including music, podcasts, audiobooks and videos, to enable Spotify teams to deliver safe, enjoyable, and inspiring listening experiences.

What You'll Do:
• Join an interdisciplinary team passionate about making every user and creator interaction with Spotify outstanding, and, in the process, pushing innovation and contributing to the wider research community.
• Apply your scientific knowledge to application-oriented problems in AI, machine learning, knowledge extraction and representation, computational social science, online safety, spoken audio and video understanding, natural language processing; use and fine-tune large language models.
• Combine insights from your expertise with those of our diverse team of research scientists.
• Help to develop thoughtful, efficient, and intuitive new ways to understand, search, explore, moderate and discover audio and video content.
• Present your results in internal forums and if appropriate and relevant, prepare a paper for publication.

Who You Are:
• You are pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or related areas with a strong computational focus.
• You have 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 the ACL, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, RecSys, KDD, SIGIR, ICWSM, AAAI, IC2S2 or related venues.
• You are a creative problem-solver who is passionate about digging into complex problems and devising innovative ways to reach results.
• You have experience with the complexities of modeling and analyzing large scale real-world data.

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 $60 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 summer internships last for approximately 10 or 12 weeks and start in mid- June 2026. The last day to apply is February 5, 2026 at 5 PM GMT.

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.

At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know - we’re here to support you in any way we can.

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.