Meet our engineers – Charlie Pastuszenski

What’s your name and where are you from?

My name is Charlie and I come from the US and grew up in Massachusetts. Before moving to Stockholm, I lived and worked for Spotify in New York City.

What do you do at Spotify?

I am a machine learning engineer. I spend my time writing data pipelines to generate training data for the machine learning models that my team and I implement. I also work on building backend services that use these models to power music recommendation features at Spotify.

What is the most challenging part of your job?

Figuring out the best ways to iterate on machine learning models after we’ve come up with something that’s “good enough”. Incremental improvements past that point can be pretty difficult!

What technology are you most excited about working with next?

I’m excited to work more with Tensorflow and Scio.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered after joining Spotify?

Probably how collaboratively we work here. It’s a great change from previous jobs where I pretty much worked entirely independently. My team really cooperates and everyone seems to be working toward the same set of goals.

What kind of music do you listen to?

A lot of yelly rock music and hip hop.

Artists frequently stop by Spotify offices to perform for the employees, which performance was your favourite?

D’Angelo played at Spotify in New York City, which was incredible. I’d wanted to see him play for years before that.

Find our available jobs here: https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job-category/data-analytics/

Tags: machine learning